Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, a big block complex in a dense urban area, was concrete, completed only a year prior. When the building manager handed me my apartment keys, she explained the heating system. I asked about air conditioning, and she said the building didn’t have it, but that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were in Canada, after all.

Five months later, I received a notification on my phone’s weather app: An extreme heat alert was in effect for British Columbia. A spring heatwave was headed for the province, with temperatures expected over 30 C (86 F), nearly 20 degrees above the seasonal average. On May 14, I awoke in the morning from a fitful sleep and checked my thermostat: 29 C (84 F). An uncomfortable indoor temperature for a Southern Californian, but hell for a Northwesterner. My concrete home had become a sauna. That afternoon, I encountered neighbors in the elevator carrying box fans and portable air conditioners; the higher the floor they were stopping at, the more their agitation level seemed to rise. It unsettled me, but I still believed my building manager: I could survive the summer heat.

I was born in Vancouver in the late 1980s and have lived in the city most of my life. Vancouverites regularly bemoan our dreary climate, but anyone who’s lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough knows what makes living here worth it. When the rain finally lifts and the trees turn green, our corner of the planet transforms into a northern paradise. Summer’s long, light-filled days—even if they have historically lasted only a couple months—are enough to forgive the rest. When a cool ocean breeze blows in at 10 p.m. on a July evening, the sky still filled with color, anything feels possible.

Summer was always my favorite season here. As a child, I anticipated it with mounting excitement each spring, certain of its transformative potential. Summer meant freedom from school and the confines of a world determined by adults; it meant water parks and beaches, crushes and bike rides late into the night.

Two decades later, I feel differently. Like many in the Northwest, I’ve come to dread summer.

Solastalgia is a word many of us have learned, as the places we grew up in and the seasons we spent there have been irrevocably altered by climate change. It’s a word drawn from the past (the Latin solacium—“comfort” or “solace”—and the Greek algos: “pain”) to describe our present. It holds both our current grief for what has been lost and anticipatory grief for a world that will be even more changed.

Where Vancouver summers were once associated with clear afternoons and gentle temperatures—a calling card that made the Pacific Northwest a promising option for climate apocalypse preppers—they’ve become seasons of extreme heat, fires, and smoke. June, July, August, and increasingly even May and September now often bring long, scorching days and the distinctive orange haze of a smoke-blanketed sun.

For many British Columbians, the summer of 2021 was a psychological turning point. Fifteen years ago, I can’t remember a June day in Vancouver reaching anywhere near 30 C; in fact, between 1976 and 2005, the city averaged just one day over 30 C per year. But in late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome that saw inland temperatures soar to nearly 50 C (122 F), shattering heat records, killing hundreds of people, and sparking fires across the province, one of which destroyed the entire town of Lytton within hours.

In Vancouver, temperatures hovered at nearly 40 C (104 F) for days, with wildfire smoke adding to the suffocating claustrophobia. Public libraries became cooling centers, and stores across the province sold out of air conditioners. Climate data analysis suggested that the event would have been 150 times less likely without human-induced climate change.

Last year, while I baked in my apartment during the May heatwave, parts of British Columbia and neighboring Alberta again burned—an early start to a Western wildfire season that would be Canada’s worst yet. In June, Canada made international headlines when smoke from wildfires in Quebec traveled south, enveloping New York City and large swaths of the Northeast for days. By the fall, flames had scorched 16.5 million hectares.

I couldn’t afford the expensive air-conditioning units my neighbors had purchased, so I spent June, July, and August in a state of chronic sleep deprivation and mental stress. I didn’t realize how much the summer’s heat had affected me until late August, when the smoke started to roll in from British Columbia’s devastating inland fires, forcing me to keep my windows closed and my air filter running to mitigate it.

Being shut in in 30-degree weather undid me. I caved and purchased an air conditioner—on sale, to mark what would usually be the season’s end. I’m glad I did. September in Vancouver was also hot and smoky. Being able to cool down inside my home provided immeasurable relief.

This year, I’m better equipped psychically as well. As Canada emerges from the warmest winter in the country’s history, and drought fuels fires that have already forced thousands to evacuate in the West, I’m planning for the likelihood of days spent indoors, avoiding the heat and smoke. I know I’m privileged to have an escape. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I’ve had to accept our new reality: Summer is no longer a time of freedom.

My solastalgia encompasses my grief not just for the climate I knew and how it has changed in my lifetime, but how I have changed in tandem. I mourn the Vancouver summers of my childhood but also the version of me that associated summer with pleasure and joy, instead of anxiety and danger.

I hope there will still be days when the sun sinks late over the Pacific on a cool evening and the future feels expansive, but I’ll experience them differently, knowing they’re a reminder of a fading season. The future they conjure will likely bring a different version of summer with it.

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Nevertheless, said Streever, author of Heat: Adventures in the World’s Fiery Places, even if most of us don’t like experiencing extremes of heat, we’re fascinated by stories of them. (Some in the crowd disagreed with the notion that high heat isn’t enjoyable.  When Streever asked how many people enjoyed Phoenix’s record 122-degree Fahrenheit day in 1990, a few hands shot up.)

Right now, hot weather keeps making the news, said Streever. Last year was the hottest on record in the lower 48 states. In President Obama’s 2013 inaugural speech, the subject had also gotten hotter. The president devoted 158 words to climate change, up from 23 words in his 2009 inauguration address. Recently, the World Meteorological Organization also got in the headlines: Libya’s 1922 record for the hottest recorded temperature was thrown out and replaced by a 1913 Death Valley record high of 134 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The story of heat is a mix of science and culture and history and literature,” said Streever. “And it’s a great story.”

One part of the story takes place in the desert. In the 1920s, a biologist named Raymond Cowles was wandering about the desert when he noticed lizards sunning. He wanted to figure out how they had adapted to survive in heat so well, so he put them on leashes and tied them up in the sun—only to learn, from their swift demise, that they hadn’t adapted very well at all. Warm-blooded creatures survive much longer in the sun than cold-blooded animals, who regulate their temperature by going in and out of the sun. “Human beings are world-champion sweaters,” said Streever—we’ve evolved to sweat better than other mammals, in fact.

The story of heat is also the story of fire, which didn’t form on Earth until 4 billion years into the planet’s existence. For the first 2 billion years on Earth, there wasn’t oxygen, which you need for fire; for the next 2 billion years, there wasn’t any fuel. We know when fire began here because the first charcoal records date back 400 million years.

Humans started to control fire somewhere between 2 million and 400,000 years ago. But fires weren’t started or experienced the way they are today until far more recently. Although we’ve had fires in houses since we had houses (150,000 years ago), we didn’t have chimneys until about 500 years ago. And matches weren’t really invented until 1828. The first matches were very different from the ones we use today. One version was called the “promethean match”: a stick topped with a glass bowl filled with sulfur and surrounded by potassium chloride. Charles Darwin used them on the Beagle and impressed natives he encountered by biting off the tips of the matches to create a fire in his mouth.

The story of humans and fire is also one of fires burning out of control, which has happened many times in the history of firefighting. Ever since the Spanish Ranch Fire of 1979, California firefighters have been required to carry a small foil fire shelter on their belts. This tiny tent offers a way for a firefighter to survive being burned over by flames. Streever has played around with a fire shelter and even tried crawling into one. “I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to be in a fire and be burned over,” he said—the heat of the fire is intensely uncomfortable, and there’s still danger in the foil melting if it gets hot enough and the tent makes contact with the flames. Although firefighters are advised to keep talking to one another if they’re being burned over, one survivor of a shelter said, “If you hear anything at all, the things you hear you don’t want to hear—you wish you had never heard.”

Humans have also had a changing relationship with fuel. Crude oil was originally discovered as a byproduct of salt wells; it was run into rivers as waste in the early 1800s. The first use of crude oil by humans was as medicine—it was bottled up, and some people rubbed it on their skin while others drank it. (Streever has tried it and did not recommend the taste.)  But investors realized that crude oil (or “rock oil” as they called it) might be a replacement for whale oil, which was running low, and they began to drill. The oil boom that we’re still living in today began in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, when drillers struck oil for the first time.

By 1919, we’d become dependent enough on crude oil that a writer in National Geographic article pondered whether there’d be enough for his children and their children, a sentiment that would be echoed over and over in the next century.

Similarly, there’s nothing new about humans talking about climate change, said Streever. As early as 1824, and stretching into the 1950s, scientists were writing and thinking about climate change. Some of them, however, saw it as a good thing—an antidote to a future ice age rather than a cause of dangerous global warming.

But even if we fear extremes today, we still crave knowledge of them. The hottest temperature Streever has dealt with came at the supercollider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The supercollider is the size of the Indianapolis Speedway, where cars get up to 235 miles per hour. Traveling around the supercollider, the nuclei of gold atoms reach up to 670 million miles per hour, creating temperatures of 70 trillion degrees. (“But it’s a dry heat,” joked Streever.) At that temperature, he and scientists were surprised to learn, matter behaves a lot like it does at absolute zero. But that is another story.

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My uncle George remembers old stories of Phoenix families making it a tradition to spend much of the summer in San Diego. At that time a healthy chunk of Phoenicians were without air conditioning. He recalls swamp coolers. San Diego represented an escape. “Often moms would go with the kids, without dads,” he told me. “When I lived there I had friends whose families were long time generations of Phoenix families that had been going for years to San Diego. Don’t forget that San Diego was really a small town until recently and attractive for that reason too.”

The tradition continues, even with air conditioning. San Diego, a great place to visit, still shares its beaches with Phoenicians during the summer months. Much like the “snow birds” that vacation in Phoenix during Midwest winters, Phoenicians take flight to escape the oppressive desert heat. The mythical Phoenix burned and emerged from ashes into a fresh body. The roadrunner, on the other hand, runs away from the heat. Perhaps “Roadrunners” is the better name for the wave of Phoenicians who leave for San Diego when things get hot.

Seasons dictate migration. Sometimes it revolves around work.

My uncle George moved to Phoenix, Arizona for work in 1979. He was fresh out of grad school from UC Berkeley. His career eventually took him to San Diego, where today he is the VP, Chief Operations Executive, for Scripps Mercy hospitals in San Diego and Chula Vista, California

The Pérez family stretches out beyond the Southwest. Generations of sons and daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren have emerged and become part of the fabric of American life. Today, our family’s doctors, teachers, engineers, public servants, lawyers, musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs define “possibility”–a long road from our family’s beginnings.

As a child my grandmother helped her parents with the pisca, or harvest. Her little hands were perfect for snatching cotton blooms from the unforgiving branches. If she tired her mother would lay her down on burlap and drag her down the line.

My great-grandparents moved like Monarch butterflies, according to the season. Apricots in June. Cotton in August. Cantaloupe in September. Every month, every place according to the fruit.

My people immigrated from the South, escaping the upheaval of the Cristero Revolution against the anti-Catholicism of the 1920s Mexican government. Most of them went through El Paso, some up through Arizona to work in the mines, and most made way to California.

Movement happens. Sometimes it’s inevitable.

I give you the Repatriation Act of 1930–President Hoover’s solution to the Depression. The plan: rid the country of Mexicans, even those who were U.S. citizens. My great-grandfather, who had nurtured a decent life for his family in the east Bay Area community of Pittsburg, California, took them of his own accord (dodging forceful deportation, also known as the free train ticket) to their “vacation home” in Encarnación de Díaz, Jalisco.

When you think of vacation home, think farm. Think of life without running water. Think of life without electricity. Think permanence. They did.

Lucky for me, some fifteen years later, the first of many relatives, unaccustomed to rural life, dreaming of the city he left behind, made his way back to the United States.

Destination: San Pedro, California. Soon more relatives followed. Some went on to Compton, Lakewood and Norwalk. Some stayed there, others went up to Azusa. Some stayed there, others back up to Northern California where my uncle Cruz, uncle George’s father, took harvest from his own backyard.

Fernando Pérez is a writer from Long Beach, California. He currently lives in Tempe, AZ where he teaches writing at both Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from ASU.

*Photo courtesy of Oggie Dog.

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Do a search and you’ll find articles written about how high school runners here have it tough. Does the heat stop them from running? Nope.

It’s only a dry heat.

Phoenix is an island. It burns.

Here we maneuver from one air-conditioned building to another. Imagine the sun’s rays like raindrops. Pretend you don’t want to mess your hair up. Some people walk around protecting their skulls with umbrellas. They look funny, but hey, they aren’t getting skin cancer.

Those of us without umbrellas trace the shade with our footsteps until we find an open door. Students of mine arrive with sweatshirts to class, believe it or not. The freezing, inside air is a refuge and a potential trigger for a common cold. That might be something my grandma believes, anyway. In truth, the respiratory system is shocked by the sudden change in temperature. Dry temperature.

Spend an hour or two on an airplane or in an air-conditioned car heading toward Phoenix. The precise moment you arrive and step into the day (or night) air, you can feel your skin being stretched, similarly to a deer hide being prepped for leather upholstery.

I like to compare summer in Phoenix to a Midwest winter: people trapped indoors reading, and building up just enough stir-crazy to go outside and build a snowman.

One California winter, my family and I were trapped in our cabin during a snowstorm up in Big Bear Lake for three hours. I’m not bragging, but it was pretty awesome. This pales in comparison, however, to what people in, say, Minnesota have to go through. Imagine “black dust,” or dirty snow blown from 50 mile-per-hour winds. Or don’t.

Here it doesn’t matter if you have shorts and a tank top on, or whether you walk out the door in jeans and a sweater; the temperature shrink-wraps your skin. You experience it best coming from somewhere like California where an 85-degree day can feel like death. Eighty-five degrees in Phoenix is a bocce in the park, with a mojito (in your other hand) kind of day. We pray for days like that. I do.

So why does it feel hotter in areas of higher humidity?

A Bill Nye moment: When there is already a high concentration of water in the air, your sweat has no place to go. In fact, the water in the air condenses on your skin. While you may feel stickier or sweatier in high humidity regions, you’re actually sweating less. But because the sweat doesn’t evaporate, you appear to sweat more. This also means that the process of sweating doesn’t cool you down much, and you feel warmer.

I prefer the dry heat to the sticky feeling I get when I’m visiting California in, say, an El Niño season. This preference extends whenever I’m forced to wait in a long line. I hate waiting. In lines especially.

It’s confusing to look out my window on a sunny day and not have even a drop of desire to “play outside.” The heat burns a hole in my motivation; a certain lethargy breeds in these extreme conditions. This is karma for the times I used to hold a magnifying glass over the ants strolling my mother’s patio.

So here’s a good question: Why the hell does Arizona subject its citizens to wait in line for primary elections in the dead of August? Do they really not want us to vote?

There are a lot of unexplained things in Arizona. Like, why doesn’t every building have a courtyard with a shaded cover and fountain in the center? Plants do well in these conditions and the overall refreshing experience is a natural answer to the dry conditions. Somebody make me city planner for a day.

Whatever the case, the weather doesn’t keep me from casting my vote, but it might not be the easiest experience for some of Arizona’s more vulnerable citizens. Or for someone without an umbrella.

Fernando Pérez is a writer from Long Beach, California. He currently lives in Tempe, AZ where he teaches writing at both Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from ASU.

*Photo courtesy of mikeyexists.

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