Moosicles

It’s so depressing. It’s hot outside and humid. Even at night time when it gets down to the 70s it’s still way too humid to go outside. Upon walking through that door everything that was once dry becomes sticky and damp. Sleeping outside is like sleeping in wet clothes that didn’t get dried all the way. Hiking or biking is like walking through the steam from a hot spring if the water was coming out of the exhaust pipe of the world’s nastiest, biggest car that ran on a mix of Elmer’s glue and gasoline.

On top of that, the days, even when sunny, are just too freaking hot. You can walk about half a mile before a profuse sweat breaks out. It’s not even a nice salty, sweaty sweat though, it’s a nasty dirty damp sweat that makes everything stick to you. Your clothes stick to you, your skin sticks together, dirt and air pollution stick to you. It’s as if you ate a dozen glazed donuts and didn’t wash your hands afterwards and then decided to spend the rest of the day touching things that were equally sticky and dirty.

Oh yeah, and another thing. It’s too sunny, yet the sun never actually does come out all of the way because it can’t quite find it’s sorry way through all of the smog and humidity. Instead, it is perpetually cloudy and stagnant. But this isn’t to say it’s not insanely bright outside. It’s furiously bright. Driving involves a lot of squinting. Think Asian people. It’s so bright because the amount of sun that does make it through the humidity and smog (which is still about a thousand times more sun than on the sunniest winter day) decides to bounce off of every possible surface, notably the black asphalt that so beautifully carpets our cities and suburbanfucks, and shoot right back up to the undersides of the humidity-clouds and then again bounce back into your eyes and onto your skin where it will likely give you permanent Cataracts and a nasty farmer’s tan, if not malignant melanoma.

With that said, a lot of people get the idea that the solution is to head over to Jordan Lake, Lake Crabtree, Bond Park Lake, Kerr Lake, or Lake Raleigh. No, I promise you, these are awful ideas. If you still think they are good ones, you haven’t actually tried to swim in them yet. First off, every single one of the above mentioned lakes are man-made. They are dammed up forests with trees sticking out of them and logs on the bottoms. The fish in them were put there by rednecks to entertain them. The water is usually brown. If you are lucky, it might be green, but either way, you won’t be able to see more than a few inches in. That means that you can’t even see your feet if you are wading in water that only comes up to your ankles. Yes, its true, I assure you. If you want to kayak, don’t bother: your kayaks will have so many spiders in it that you’ll be itchy with bites and covered in webs the moment you get in. Hopefully none of the bites will be from black widows. When that happens, you’ll probably pass out and drown in the middle of the lake. If you are fortunate enough that your kayak doesn’t flip when you slump over, you will still be met with the most excruciating pain of your life (worse than having a child women say) and then die anyways because the paramedics won’t come and get you. Not because you are in the middle of a lake in a kayak, but because they don’t want to face the heat and humidity.

Another reason not to go in the water is that it’s not even allowed at some lakes. The government admits that it’s so bad at lake Crabtree that you aren’t allowed to swim in the water. Not one of the lakes allows you to eat more than one of two fish out of it because they are all full of unpronounceable chemicals and mercury. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the lakes are all just big cover-ups of former nuclear testing sites.

If you try to go sailing, just forget it. There’s no wind. To explain my point, Jordan Lake has an insanely overactive weather station that you can call at any time and get the current wind conditions and temperature. When I say it’s overactive, I mean that on a calm day in the fall or winter it will respond by telling you that wind speeds are 20 miles an hour. At the warmest part of a winter day, the stupid thing will be convinced that it’s 90 degrees out. In the summer, it’s so hot that the thermometer entirely fails. Yet the wind speed reading is a dead zero degrees. In fact, the air tends to move so slowly that time kind of comes to a halt and people just die for no apparent reason.

Oh, but the mosquitoes thrive off of stopped time. It lets them suck your blood more easily. Friends won’t even go in my backyard in the summer in fear of being eaten alive. I can’t really check the garden when I get home anymore because I don’t enjoy the sight of looking at my ankles being munched on by about 50 to 100 mosquitoes. But that’s okay, because my garden pretty much dies when it gets like this outside. For a month or so in the springtime the garden was doing great. The vines would grow about six inches a day. Maybe they though they were bamboo or something but summer has certainly told them otherwise. Nothing grows anymore. There’s been a small pumpkin in the garden for about a month now. It exploded from the size of a nut to the size of a soft ball in about a week, but once it got as hot as it is now, it just stopped and said, screw this, it’s too hot and humid to move. The pumpkin leaves all droop down during the day as if drooping will kill them and put them out of their misery. The beans have all gotten strange heat related diseases, and the peas have shriveled up and died completely. Even the dogwoods and Inca ivy leaves droop constantly. Not even rain is enough to make them perk up.

So yeah, that’s a typical summer in North Carolina. On a good year, a Hurricane will come by and provide some critical entertainment, as well as maybe bring the temperature down from 105 to 102 and maybe allow plants just enough water that they don’t commit suicide. Actually, Hurricanes are especially useful because they remind all of the property owners with houses on the outer banks that they are complete morons and are trying to put houses where houses shouldn’t go. Hurricanes are good about doing that. Maybe this year will pick up a bit – there are more hurricanes than normal predicted. But then again, it’s also feasible that a hurricane will decide to scoop up a hundred million gallons of oil and wash them up on our shores from the Gulf Coast.

In addition to Hurricanes, another great perk that NC provides for us in the summer is lightning storms. Occasionally the atmosphere will realize that it’s got more humidity and heat than it can handle and it will puke. It’s puke is electrifying and deadly, also known as lighting. While the lightning can be powerful and beautiful, it doesn’t last and there’s no good place to view it from. Because of the vast amount of trees and complete lack of hills or mountains, there’s nowhere high up enough that you can go to sit in the car and watch the lighting strike its victims. A few sky scrapers in Raleigh and maybe the occasional radio tower are tall enough, but personally I wouldn’t want to be in a radio tower during a lighting storm and no skyscraper-owning corporation values the little people enough to let them observe the skyline.

While I’m at it, I should mention that you can’t really do anything outdoors, even if you somehow manage to lose your sanity and brave the heat, humidity, ticks, and mosquitoes. It requires a certain small knowledge that there won’t be hail and lighting coming your way before you go off and put up a metal tent in the forest or hang your hammock between two trees that make sketchy deals with the storms for free electricity. This simple type of knowledge is impossible to obtain here because the weather is permanently stuck under the category of “thunderstorms likely”. Sometimes I wonder if the meteorologists just don’t bother to come in to work in the summer to update their forecasts because it’s too hot to get from their front door to the car. Even the rare day that there is no possibility of thunderstorms or rain, there is probably 105 degree heat, direct sun that penetrates the skin right down to the bones, and what we call the “air quality alert” – also known as smog. This is the kind of stuff where the meteorologists on TV admit that the humidity in the air has acted like glue and decided to grab all of the particulate matter coming out of your exhaust pipe, and shove it down your lungs. On these special days teachers aren’t even allowed to take their classes outside for recess. Not even for 5 minutes. Either way though, storms predicted or not, you probably won’t have one. The predictions are wrong about 97% of the time. In fact, it’s so predictable that the predictions will be wrong that they should really be reversed and called “unpredictions.” With an unprediction, when they say one thing, you know the opposite will happen. Of course though, I should not fail to mention the little fact that last time I went hammock camping at Umstead, there was the definite prediction that there would be no rain or storm that evening. Right as I had reached that heavenly point right in between being alive and being dreaming, I was awakened by flashing and banging. We had ridden our bikes into the park and were about 30 minutes from the outside of the park. Either way though, we were going to be on metal bikes or we were hanging from two trees that happened to be right next to gigantic power lines. We were screwed. Somehow we got out of that situation alive, but it wasn’t fun. I should have known it was an unprediction, not a prediction.

So yeah, it would be nice if either a hurricane or autumn would hurry up and get here. Either one is fine with me.