Ghost of Summer

The summer of 2021 died peacefully in the wee hours of a mid-August morning. I thought the patter of rain outside our bedroom window was a dream. Temperatures of over 100 degrees a few days before were replaced by low 70s, with 80s forecast for at least a week. The ghost of summer had arrived. Overnight, our season of anxiety had become a much cooler shadow of its overheated self.

Ten years spent in the summer sauna of the Midwest has given me a profound sense of gratitude for our clear-eyed days, low humidity, and luxuriant multitude of greens in the Pacific Northwest. Now, those easy-going months of summer are but a memory. On June 27, Eugene reached an unprecedented 111 degrees. I put Mom in the air-conditioned car and we drove to the Johnny Gunter place in the central Coast Range, where the front porch thermometer registered 112 degrees. I was convinced the barn swallow family nesting in the garage would be killed by the heat.

In early August I was driving east on I-105 when the plume from the Middle Fork Complex fire east of Oakridge blossomed into the stratosphere like an earthbound cumulonimbus. The smoke seemed to be rising just over the ridge from Mom’s place, even though the fire was thirty miles southeast. The plume produced a moment of PTSD. Only a year had passed since the Holiday Farm Fire raced down the McKenzie Valley. My brother and I worked for three days in thick smoke to make her place more fire-resistant. The flames eventually stopped ten miles to the east.

Holiday Farm Fire

A collective cloud of grief years in the making has gathered over the summer of 2021. David Wagner eloquently captured the multitude of crises in his August Eugene Weekly column “It’s About Time.” The treatment of ecological grief is now attracting a growing group of therapists, and published papers on the subject are hitting mainstream journals like The Lancet. My own grief comes from staring into a hotter and drier future, then gazing into the eyes of my grandsons. More drought. More heat warnings. More fires. I’m accepting the real possibility that someday the Johnny Gunter place may burn. I’m trying to use materials for the remodel that will reduce the toxicity of the plume should the house ignite.

Johnny Gunter house

Grieving is a critical emotional process for dealing with immediate or anticipated loss. But danger lurks when our grief becomes all-consuming and monolithic. Life can become a garden of gloom that germinates the seeds of despair, hopelessness, and nihilism that rampantly overgrow our joy. Our emotional survival depends upon remaining connected with joy, even and especially in this diminished world. In a recent essay entitled “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days Grieving”, New York Times guest columnist Margaret Renkl powerfully acknowledges a world bereft from climate change. She then asserts that life is too short to remain in sorrow, and goes on to describe the living beauty of summer in her native southeastern United States: lightning bugs, singing katydids, goldfinches on black-eyed Susans, and much more.

This summer my joy came from the barn swallows nesting in the garage at the Johnny Gunter place. A pair of adults arrived as usual in May and set up housing in one of several mud cups plastered to the rafters. On each of my weekly arrivals, they sliced with sickled tails into the open front of the garage. Their sunlit backs were a glimmering incandescence of navy blue as they chittered their swallow rebuke at me from the electrical wire above the garden. I worried about disturbing them when I fired up the engine on the portable sawmill just outside the garage. I began pushing the riding lawnmower from inside the garage into the parking area before starting it. I thought the nestlings would die in that oppressive late June heat. All summer the pair scolded. All summer I fretted about whether they were spending enough time on the nest to hatch a brood. All summer they stayed the course. And all summer I have wondered at the miracle of barn swallows. How have they managed to occupy this garage for these twenty-five years I have been coming here? How do they decide when to return? How are those mud cups passed on to successive generations of swallows? How do they determine when to leave? Where do they overwinter? How much better does my garlic grow when fertilized with barn swallow poop?

Barn Swallow

Finding barn swallow joy in a withered world is not an antidote for grief. Our grieving is not something to be painted over. Every being that has been lost occupied a unique place in space and time, whether they were a person dead from a Louisiana hurricane, a species now extinct, or that special forested valley blackened by fire. Losing them is not something we should “get over.” Healing is not forgetting—it is a process of reforming our lives around the inimitable hole left in the wake of their departure. In her foreword for the collection Old Growth (published by Orion magazine), Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible. This, too, is a gift, for when we fall in love with the living world, we cannot be bystanders to its destruction. In other words, to be response-able we need to stay connected with our loss and remain conscious of what we are losing. Our sorrow is vastly important to our future.

In this admixture of grief and joy, I find myself wondering if we could hold both emotions in our awareness simultaneously. Could we, with our partitioned western brains, engage in a feeling that melds both grief and gratitude, or sorrow and joy? Some psychologists champion a concept of duality, in which deep grieving is experienced along with joy and hope.

Achieving duality stretches my emotional imagination. But I do remember experiencing something like grief/joy when my running tribe was relaying the race number of our terminally ill friend around the Eugene Marathon course. I had the honor of handing his number off to him just before he joined all of us to jog and walk the last three miles to the finish. It was his 100th marathon. I was sobbing uncontrollably and had to leave the course for a moment to gather myself. My friends assumed I was grief-stricken, even though there was intense joy beneath the tears.

Perhaps we might learn to strap these conflicting but necessary emotions tightly together. Then when we encounter the grief of lung-damaging wildfire smoke we might quickly remember the liberation of a wide-eyed smoke-free summer sky. Regardless of how we conjoin these emotions, moving forward into a constructive future requires that we both remember our grief and find our joy.

By late July three barn swallows had fledged. My chest became more spacious, partly in joy, partly in relief that they had made it through despite the heat and my weekly interruptions. Summer flowed on into the depths of a hot August, and they spent less of their day around the nest and became increasingly airborne above the needled ridges. Sometime in mid-August, the Johnny Gunter barn swallows left. Perhaps they swooped south when the vaporous ghost of this blistered summer drifted in. The cornflower skies above the house became lonely. I sighed. I smiled. Sadly. Joyfully.

Barn Swallow nest

[NOTE: An earlier version of this piece was first published in the September issue of Nature Trails, a monthly publication of the Eugene Natural History Society.]