Adjusting to Summer Cold

It's really summer now.  Wherever you are, the weather is wrapping itself around you in its own special way. Here, where the  western edge of the Northern Hemisphere is also called California, nothing unusual is going on. No tornadoes, no blazing fires borne on high-speed winds, and no humidity. The nothingness of our summer has settled in.  Come here. Take a break from all that extreme stuff and cool off for a while. We love visitors, especially ones with red sweaty faces and puffy ankles who live in inland areas where it's so darned hot.  I think I remember heat.  And sunshine.  Round bright thing in the sky, right?

I try to explain why we get this gray fog all summer on the coast. Sometimes I make some sense as I try to explain low pressure and high pressure, cold ocean and inland heat. There's no denying that we wear sweaters in the summer and that only ten miles away (6 k for my readers outside the US), the heat is much more noticeable and the summer much more, um, summery.  I have to go there for a summer-weather fix because it sure doesn't come here.

When I was a small child growing up in Carmel Valley - 12 miles inland from Carmel - I was content to remain right where I was. When I looked west in the afternoons, I could see a hideous gray wall of engulfing fog, a misery that made no sense to go near. I spent my summers shoeless and in the pool, chlorinated and tan. The fog bank caused, and of course still causes, an afternoon wind to pick up in inland valleys, but we were protected from it by a weather ceiling that lifted about 6 miles from Carmel in the area called Farm Center (a local's name for a small shopping center).

"Do you kids want to go with me to Carmel today?" my mother would ask entreatingly.

"NO!!!!" would come the instant yell from five throats.  No way, too awful, cold and gray.  I'd always end up shivering and having to wear two layers of clothes at the beach.  Beaches were for idiots as far as I knew, idiots who liked sand fleas, kelp and 50 degree water. I did not buy into the idea that girls wore bikinis to beaches anywhere. It was a lie.

So, here I am living in a place like Carmel, but not as precious as it is or self-indulgent, and I am wrapped in a cold gray expanse of featureless weather all summer long.  Sometimes I can't wait for the summer to pass; it's never short enough now.

So the real question is:  Why do I live here if the summers are so miserable?  I'm making a list of pros and cons, and the cons are starting to make more sense - at least in the summer.  The rest of the year?  That's a different story.

Real Sunlight For A Change

The bay is cerulean blue and has slopping waves at its edges.  You can feel there is fog out there a few miles offshore, but the sun is leaning against it with riches and glory.  Fog is skulking somewhere, sending a scurrying little breeze in to shore to scout a path inland, but it will be much later in the afternoon.  Now, in the full glare of a summer sky,  everyone is waving their hands and exclaiming about the way summer has suddenly appeared.  Heaven looks so blue today, a sweet shade, with trees reaching up into it.

I took off for the pool as soon as I was sure there would be bright sun, jumped in and swam and swam.  My shadow moved back and forth along the bottom, songs ran through my head and my friends joined in, with their own songs in their minds, too.  Even though we swim every day that we can, the sight of brilliantly flashing droplets flying from our fingertips and arms as we swam was beautiful, a delight.  The drops could have been diamonds; I imagined they were sometimes.

When the fog sits around for so long, as it has lately, it is as unwelcome as a freeloading visitor with no intention of doing anything, withholding warmth and comfort.  In comparison, the sun is sheer perfection when it shines again, holding all the power of the universe, transforming moods and scenery in the span of one second.  What a contrast it can be when it happens, and how giddy we become, drenched in the unaccustomed glare of true unadulterated sunlight.

Pacific Grove Suffers For You

I just looked outside and noticed the fog was a shade brighter than it has been for the past few days.  This is cause for joyous celebration, so I am going to take a walk.  But first, I'm adding a few splashes of color to this page just in case the brightness fades and Pacific Grove is plunged back into colder shades of foggy gloom.

I suffer for you, you readers who live in roasting hot climates, but I also envy you sometimes.  I know what it's like to shade all windows in the middle of the day, turn on fans, keep plenty of ice on hand for cool drinks.  I have lived in places that felt like I was living in a pizza oven, sort of, and kept me flattened to cool walls or begging for a nice cool swim.

Because of your climate, I have mine.  The Pacific Ocean is massively huge and deep, and very cold.  Our fair beaches boast an average water temperature of about 54 degrees Fahrenheit or colder most of the year.  One dash into that cold and you are sure to come screaming out again with blue lips and goose bumps all over your body.

When your day heats up into triple digits, the air where you are rises - usually - and creates a low-pressure vacuum that pulls our cold air inland to you.  Because you are feeling like a melted blob of gum on the pavement when you go outdoors, I feel like a popsicle when I step outside here.

So, with numbed, stiffened fingers, I sit here at the only warmth in the house, the keyboard of my Macbook.  I am literally wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, jeans and multiple warm layers of things on my feet.  And I'm still cold.  It's this way every year here in the Groove.  So it's fogburns for us in order that you may have a somewhat cooler breeze where you are.  When your area cools down later in the year, it will be wonderful here at last and we can have a leftover summer.  We accept it; we are stoic and love fleece, wool, and down.  It's part of being in the groove, shuffling along to the beat of a really cold drummer.

Sigh. There went the brightness, just now.  And I'm ready to go for a walk so I can warm up for a while in the middle of July.  Let's see, where are my mittens and hat.....

Summer Rhythm

Sunlight is darting through shreds of fog that trail about like visible dreams.  The drifting vapors make shifting shapes overhead, now thickening densely and then thinning into transparency again.  The fog seems bound straight for inland valleys but then pulls back again, as if breathing heavily, in and out, over the course of the day.  

The dance moves mysteriously and silently without end all summer long, tempo quickened by northern or southern breezes in the afternoon, quieting after the sun sails over the western horizon.

You see a grey smudge heaving over the hilltops in the distance as if the hills themselves were pulling a gray blanket up to their chins and curling up for a nap.  But, the stern draping blanket cools the hills down and they lie shivering and damp in the cold gray light.

It's the summer rhythm of our coast, the respiration of an ecosystem, visible as moving moist air and the rise and fall of varying breezes.  If the sun glances back at a certain time of afternoon and finds thin spots in the fog, the tawny grasses that flank rolling hills are set alight and glow.

Warm Inside

Summer has been cold in The Groove this week.  Birds are flying around wearing down booties and vests, and furry wildlife members of the community have not been willing to give up their winter coats just yet.  It's 55 degrees right now, the middle of the day, the middle of June.  I have an icicle hanging from my nose and my fingers are stiff.

Lucky I have this warm laptop to keep me warm.

After my swim this morning (yes! I'm sticking with it!), I showered in dismally tepid water and drove away from the college feeling shivery.  Is it summer?  Really?  Please send some heat, people!  I'll trade you some heat for this murky chill.  You can keep the mosquitoes though.

The cold in my core was crying for something warm and comforting.  I needed reviving, something just short of mamma. The Wild Plum is on the way home, and feels like home used to, full of comfort and peace.  I hadn't stopped in for a long time, but I remembered they have deep, rich lattes to snuggle up to.  

The Wild Plum Cafe has made its reputation on homemade-style baked goods that are very different from the French style available right around the corner at Parker-Lousseau (another post, another day).  Hearty, organic muffins and poofy "steamer-style" eggs are typical of their fare.  (A steamer is pretty much the kind of eggs you can make yourself in the microwave oven - very fluffy texture.)  I've been to a few seminars, meetings around town that have been catered by The Wild Plum.  Large "wraps" and burritos are huge favorites.  Portions are generous in size, colorful and healthy, good for what ails ya, like our icebox summer weather.

I ordered a health-neutral repast of bacon, eggs and a large bowl of fruit.  Latte please, please, please!  I had hardly knocked the frost off my shoulders when my food arrived.  I think that was about a three-minute wait.

A table of four women near me filled the air with laughter and smiles.  They were trading photos of kids and catching up on each others' lives.  I suddenly wanted to cry and felt a lump.  Emotions, my dear, emotions arising at the oddest times.  I laughed and chided myself for having wandered out of my own opera, but I saw the familiarity they had with each other, the companionship and loving regard for lives lived on bumpy roads.  Warmth and humor, set with mason jars of flowers and platters of real honest food.

Again, I felt grateful to be enjoying fine health in a bountiful region.  I saw the blessed faces of the women encircling the table, knew nothing about them except that they were filled up with love, so abundantly obvious in all their eyes.

The interior of the place is accented with plum-toned paint and art in the California organic hippie genre.  I'll call it that, but it's not meant as a disparagement.  Everything looks handmade, earnest, organic, comforting.  Wait staff are casual and friendly, smiling right into your eyes, and mean it when they call "Thank you!" as you leave.  

My latte did its work and I felt reinvigorated, but the day was no lighter outside than before, still 55 degrees.  The only difference between Monterey where The Wild Plum is and here in Pacific Grove is that here we have a stiff breeze, too.  Yes, summer is lovely, but warmth is here in our hearts, perhaps in defiance of the cold gray expanses of the Pacific skies.  

Pacific Grove - Is Summer Really Winter?

"Summer's back in Pacific Grove," say the locals, laughing but shivering.  We're all freezing to death and turning on our heaters.  Coffee houses are doing a booming business with fireplaces lit and customers huddled, holding their coffee mugs like handwarmers.  Fog enshrouds every feature of landscape and trees drip with moisture like miniature rainstorms.  Seagulls sit forlornly in the chill morning air, unwilling to fly.  Chances are slim for any glimpse of sun if you are within ten miles of the coast.

We have hit a steady 57 degrees for the midday high, and that's without wind chill.  It's really odd to go through a 14-hour daylight period of time and never be able to tell what time of day it really is.  8 AM looks exactly like noon, which looks exactly like 4 PM.  You lose your sense of direction.  People stagger a bit.  Fog legs are like sea legs.  You live in the fog for a while and go to sunny places, and you feel exposed, uncertain, blinded.

In a total display of atmospheric irony, people getting baked to death who live inland in the Central Valley in Modesto or Fresno or Stockton come to the coast for relief and feel refreshed, enlivened and thrilled to have escaped the heat.  At the same time, we fog-shriveled coast dwellers jump in our cars and head for the heat, hoping desperately to be able to see our own shadow for a few hours and dry out our clothes and hair.

"Well, I'm layin' out my winter clothes and wishin' I was home, goin' home
Where the New York City winters aren't bleeding me."  - excerpt from The Boxer by Paul Simon

I used to listen to that song all the time and wonder what winter clothes were, being a kid growing up in sunny California.  I did have a jacket for winter, but a whole set of clothes for the winter season?  Nyah...

Now that I've been in Pacific Grove for a while, I wonder if there are anything but winter clothes.  I've been wearing the same things every day for the past year except for the time I spent in Hawaii in February.  I don't expect to have anything but the shivers for a few more months.

Time to go raid REI for some new summer gloves and maybe a pair of fleece-lined summer pants.  It's just part of the specific groove of living here.  Fungus Corners, aka Pacific Grove is truly cool.  Right on, baby, that's awesome.  Warm fuzzy clothes in the summertime.