In a Hot, Dry Season

Last week it was 100 degrees for four days in a row, the first time since the upstate started keeping records in 1918. One day about 4 p.m. the mercury officially topped out at 105. People were suffering in the abnormal heat, so we were among the lucky ones. Our air conditioning (thank goodness for human ingenuity) was humming along, but a few times a day I wandered outside into the world so I could feel it in my face, on my body-historic heat.

Each morning I took the dog down to the creek before the heat rose, but there wasn't much to see. The mighty Lawson's Fork was only a weak trickle. The old tire I use to gauge stream flow was all the way out of the water, something I haven't seen since we moved out here five years ago. It's been a full month with only a trace of rain, and the five months before that we had 10 inches less than what we'd normally register. The only creatures enjoying this low water are the gray graceful herons observing the deep bends where the fish are congregating. The buffet's open all day, easy pickings for them.

The big beautiful piedmont hardwood trees started the year stressed from a late, hard frost. Now, dry and stressed again, they're dropping their leaves long before fall. The records will show it wasn't a very good year for photosynthesis. This year's growth ring will be thin.

In the flood plain understory the tender stemmed plants like jewelweed have shriveled and collapsed. There are fissures in the mud. The sand in the bends is dry as Arabia. If this pattern persists and we keep getting 30 inches of rain per year instead of our normal 48 then our woods could look like the Texas Hill County outside of Austin. Can you say scrub oak and juniper?

I don't want to live in Texas. I like the rainforest feel of the humid South Carolina piedmont woods. I'm at home if I'm surrounded by lush vegetation and full rivers. I want my winters cold and wet and my summers hot, but not too hot.

"Human and Puny," that's what my friend Deno Trakas called a book of poems a few years ago. The title poem came from a dream he had in which a famous poet showed him to the back door. They'd been talking inside the poet's house about Deno's work and the old poet had given him a bad review. Deno turns on the bottom step and says, "Well, that's because you're human, human and puny."

Of course what Deno means is that human beings-even great poets-are puny in the face of time. No matter what we achieve in life, human bodies age, and we slip away. To be human is to accept how frail we are in the end. One human cannot stand up to entropy, the great natural winding down of systems. At least that's how I read his poem.

But there's another way to look at it all-to be human is also to possess the power to cause great change over time, for better or for worse. Since the Industrial Revolution our species has brought about the complete alteration of our planet-from your back yard to the Arctic, there is not a square mile of land or ocean that his not been changed by our presence. We humans invented air conditioning, but we also put a hole in the ozone. We've built malls and fast food strips for convenience and profit, but we're responsible for mass extinctions and unprecedented habitat destruction. We drive fast and our windows are electric, but we're melting the glaciers. We have tinkered our way into a position where it looks like we have altered the very weather itself.

So individually we're human and puny, but collectively we've changed everything we've touched, even on a planetary level. Remember this last week of 100-degree days. You sweated through an historic moment. You might have even seen the future, and it's too hot.