Summer as Quest (Labor Day 2013)

This is the time of the year when I would normally start panicking. It being late August, we find ourselves once again cresting on a rising tide of suffocating heat that traditionally engulfs the entire Southwest during the Labor Day holiday, sapping our strength and leaving us cowering inside our air-conditioned buildings. What had seemed until a few short weeks ago a mild summer has proven to be yet another deceptive promise, and sooner or later accounts were bound to be settled. The heat, after all, is an unavoidable mainstay of this region, smothering everything in its wake and signaling once again a fiery end to the summer. Of course it was silly to believe otherwise, for don’t we live in a topographical salad bowl of natural high pressure, bounded by mountains as we are and located in a southern latitude? I speak of the weather as if it were the cause of the anxiety mentioned in the opening, but as usual it is necessary to search below the surface to come to an understand of a period of the year that I have now come to associate with latent and nervous expectancy.

By now, school has been in session for several weeks, earlier than ever. This early start is a recent change, and it wasn’t always so. I remember that the reprieve for public school students lasted until after the Labor Day holiday, but nowadays, school calendars have been adjusted, one suspects, in order to accommodate budgetary concerns, although claims are made that earlier starts are necessary to extend the school year and offset other breaks that are now allotted. It is early August and we now see the uncharacteristic sight of school buses disgorging crowds of students, and long lines of cars around our many public schools during periods of drop-off and pick-up. I see the students from my old high school slouching slowly down the streets in the early afternoon, heading towards Bethlehem and waiting to be born, if I may paraphrase the famous poem by Yeats. I wonder about the cycles of life, and can’t help but reflect on my own journey.

The start of the school year must come like a shock to everyone involved. It is certainly the case for the teachers, faced with the prospect once again of new groups of students who must seem as unruly and untamed as ever, irritated all the more so by the fact that the hot weather outside leaves them feeling cheated, bound as they are to their desks. The old adage proclaims that school is a waste of good health, and I suppose young people must feel it much more than older people do.

I remember the pain of having to return to school, and in particular, the transition between junior high and high school. It was hotter than we could bear outside, and I was more nervous than I could confess when I received my appointment to register for the academic term. I remember my first impressions, seeing young men who sported beards and openly smoked in designated areas, and young women who liked just as glamorous as the icons we saw on television, in shows such as Charley’s Angels. They were much more confident that I could ever imagine being, and when they weren’t mocking us freshmen and sophomores, they took no notice of us. We were beneath contempt, in other words, and I felt that many of my teachers treated me the same way.

As if the start of each academic term wasn’t nerve-wracking enough, we had to deal with the intense heat, made worse by frequently airless classrooms. We were soaked in sweat, sitting next to the attractive girls who we imagined had the olfactory sense of bloodhounds, and were bound to denounce us for the foibles of biology and the weather. It didn’t help that some of our teacher found it necessary to snap at us as well as we fell under the soporific influence of the heat.  These conditions made everyone irritable, something that was evident inside and outside of school, as much in the past as in the present as well.

For one thing, drivers were more irritable, and I remember the glares if I dawdled too long at a light, or drove too slowly.  My first car accident took place during an August long ago, after I had graduated from UCLA and begun my career as an engineer. I was having difficulty adjusting, and was reporting to a lab facility where I felt I was being hazed in subtle as well as obvious ways, making the prospect of reporting to work very unpleasant. I made a left turn into the path of an oncoming car that I was sure should have started stopping because the light had turned orange, but instead accelerated and barreled straight into the side of my car. I did a half spin, and I remember the feeling of disorientation and shock that seemed to encapsulate when I associated with this conjunction of August, the heat, and a job that wasn’t for me. Blame it on the season and on eternal human foibles.

There is no telling if the heat, in the same way that alcohol does, doesn’t peel away inhibitions. Besides all the instances of irritability I perceived in others, and which I would also have to acknowledge myself, I couldn’t help but think of it as the missing element, the catalyst that brought existing unstable chemical (read personal as well as social) conflicts to a boil. It was during one summer long ago that still shimmers in my memory that we heard a knock on our front door late at night, after we had all gone to bed. It turned out to be our neighbor, a middle-aged woman who looked like an apparition out of a ghost story, with a swollen face, a black eye and blood that was trickling down from the corner of her mouth. She was crying softly, and we kids forgot our manners as our parents spoke to this neighbor, the mother of our friends, and asked them for their help driving her to her parents’ home. I remember the same feeling of disorientation, a dreamlike quality that accompanies seeing something that your mind is not quite prepared to accept, rationalize it as we may, and all the while, our neighbor’s husband was yelling drunkenly from his front yard, threatening my parents if they intervened in what he said was a private matter.

My car crash was one such episode, and this memory of seeing a battered woman pleading for help was another that helped to cement the thought I had that summer was when misfortune and a pulling back of the veils was most apt to occur. It was as if the sunlight was a merciless goad that accentuated existing conflicts, the feeling of not fitting in, the fears that we all had, in the same way that we shed perspiration.  Was this not once again the effect of the heat, of those long stretches of unbearable days in which our misfortunes seem more unbearable than ever before, when the underlying dynamics of an unstable situation were revealed? And could we not extend this as well to other scales, to the social element and to that we associated with social movement, to the epoch that seems so long ago but that in reality was of recent vintage, the era of the Civil Rights movement?

There were, of course, idyllic moments as well. As stressful as it might have been for our parents to have us alone in our house while they were forced to attend to their jobs, or as stressful as it was to make the adjustment to a new school, there were still quiet moments of contemplation when I could reflect on my past. For one thing, the heat makes us lethargic, and the long breaks (for those of us who were lucky not to have to work) left us with long afternoons when time seemed endless and we eagerly awaited the cool breezes of the afternoon. Maybe we might be lucky enough to see vast storm clouds in the sky, which might or might not offer a moment of relief. We could play with the radio on our parents’ stereo set, and listen to the stations that were forbidden to hear otherwise, those that played top ten hits in English, and that our parents would never let us listen to otherwise because they were afraid we were acculturating too quickly. There were the adventures with friends while riding on our bikes, when I hesitate to admit that, yes, I would leave my younger sister and brother alone at home watching television while I would take a quick ride up the street to see who could better imitate Evel Knevel, me or my friend. And there were the long hours watching reruns on television, the game shows that we barely understood, the ribald remarks, the spectacle of untrammeled consumerism and materialist glee, the episodes of the Three Stooges or Gilligan’s Island or, of course, my favorite, the episodes of Star Trek, where I could project my own desires.

Miraculously I managed to avoid being struck by drivers when I rode my bike recklessly, drivers who nonetheless cursed me liberally and creatively, throwing in a few offensive ethnic remarks, and giving me the perverse pleasure of thinking that they deserved it.  And there were the hours spent at the library, browsing in the science fiction section and trying to be strategic about how I would tackle the task of reading the entire collection maintained by the library. Start with the serializations of Star Trek, especially those published by the noted British science fiction writer James Blish, then proceed to the Hugo and Nebula award winners, then to those that had rave reviews on their covers by other authors I admired, then to those that had interesting covers, then to those that mentioned the presence of space ships in their blurbs, etc.

The library was always a special haunt for me, and I found it easy to imagine that I was indeed on a space ship, for the library had big windows and, on particularly hot days, there were few pedestrians outside, contributing to the illusion that we were traveling through an empty landscape, maybe on one of those multi-generational ships that would take thousands of years to reach the nearest star, and maybe, just maybe, my generation was the one that would live to see the promise fulfilled of arrival. More than a few times I must have been caught napping, to the annoyance of the librarians, but how could I explain that it was just an instance of cryogenic suspension?

The intensity of the heat would build slowly during the summer. As the days grew longer, the long stretches of time dizzied us. We needed a break from all that time, a way to make it less onerous, and perhaps it is this impulse that makes us reserve our summers for ambitious projects, for trips, for home improvement projects, for picking up a new skill, for practicing an old one, and just for trying to find a way to lighten the load. Older teenagers live for the nightlife, what exists in such a backwards corner of California as Corona was, an outlying suburb of Los Angeles where people could make their salaries stretch a little more, even if we were more prone to fires. I remember that as we hit August the heat would crest, and we would be bombarded then as now by the same breathless reports on the news about heat waves, about crowded freeways, and about gang shootings in Los Angeles.

Living in Los Angeles at the time, little did we know about the underlying conflicts that were slowly coming to a boil. I remember the report of the slaying of an African-American teenager, Latasha Harkins by a Korean market owner, way back in March of 1991, an event that took place shortly after the beating of motorist Rodney King, and which presaged an explosion that was sure to come. There had always been long-simmering tensions not only in East Los Angeles but also in south central districts, and the stories of drive-by shootings dramatically punctuated our newscasts. Things were not going well in our city, and yet we continued going through the motions, with most of the residents in the West Los Angeles area where I lived shaking their heads sadly when I broached the topic. The celebratory glow of Los Angeles in the wake of the 1984 Olympics was slowly being snuffed out, and there was a sense of unease, of that nervous expectancy that I spoke of and that I associated with the summers. Hadn’t the Watts riots taking place during the summer, during a fateful weak in August of 1965?

There was a special edge to the reporting of crimes during the summer months, and a feeling of menace that accrued to statistics that showed an increase in crimes. Gangs were much in the news, and it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a sensationalistic response on the part of Hollywood. We had witnessed the release of the movie “Colors”, movies that tied in with the popular theme of social breakdown, in this case, attributed not to overpopulation or to ecological despoliation, but to certain social phenomena that were associated with ethnic communities, a sort of threat to the “Western” values that was so breathlessly denounced by conservative figures in their critique of academe and the “liberal” press. It was all coming to a boil, the inevitable reaction.

Well, the Rodney King riots arrived with an inevitable fatality in April 1992. I remember the evening when the results of the first trial acquitting the officers were read, for I was at UCLA, attending an evening poetry class that was offered through their evening extension program. We heard reports about window being broken in Westwood, and we briefly considered whether or now we should cancel the class before we decided to continue.  Although they took place in April, and they gave rise to several long and dreary days of rioting, with the smell of despair and anger in the afternoon reaching us all the way in west Los Angeles, these memories have a summer edge to them in my mind. They were tied, once again, to the conception I had that sunlight was capable as much of deceiving us as of releasing our innermost fears (and hopes), and the light of those Korean storefronts were like the fires that blazed through the deserts, canyons and hills during the summer, a fire that was meant to cleanse, even if it left us with the sordid aftertaste of footage we will never forget, such as the beating of the white truck driver, Reginald Denny.

There had always been fires during the summer, reported breathlessly on local news coverage. There occurred in outlying areas, in canyons, in the mountains around Santa Monica, in Angeles National Forest, and even in what I imagined were the few remaining wild places in Orange County. Was it possible to assign these events a social dimension as well? We were certainly captivated by the footage that was transmitted to us by the news choppers, and sometimes, when traveling to visit family members in Riverside County, I might happen to see the smoke plumes that transmitted what seemed to me to be messages waiting to be deciphered. Once, the fires reached the southern hills on the outskirts of Corona, and they blazed live lava flows, with residents being urged to stay inside and avoid breathing the air. As if it were that easy to separate ourselves, in the same way that the flames in South Central Los Angeles engulfed the whole psychic imaginary of the nation in 1992.

If ghosts can be interpreted as symbolic representations of unresolved conflicts, then the fires that we say in a way served a parallel function, for just as they indicated a social breakdown in Los Angeles during the Watts and the Rodney King riots, they indicated a pattern of unsustainable an unrealistic land development that pointed to social divisions that were widening in California. New settlements are built on outlying areas that are meant to be protected by a cushion of separation from our urban areas, for these settlements are typically reserved for higher income households, and they are evidence of how urban flight is impinging on our few remaining wildlife areas, where brush and trees prove just as combustible as the tortured and conflictive social dynamics in other areas. Many of these fires are set by arsonists, we must add, and while no social agenda is proclaimed, one can’t help but think they are motivated by instances of socially marginalized individuals who are expressing a message of rebellion, even if they don’t recognize it as such. And in the meantime, Nero continues to fiddle while Rome burns.

The nervous expectancy of summers was also evoked by moments of transition. I remember, for example, my first teaching post in Kansas. I arrived in mid-August, flying into Kansas City during my birthday and thinking that it couldn’t possibly be as hot as Riverside County which I had just left behind. I was chagrined to find out that the heat was probably more intense and uncomfortable than any I had experience before, and I kept on thinking of the Portuguese word, “abafado”, that always had sounded to me like a stew. The difference, of course, was attributable to the qualitative difference in the heat, specifically, to the humidity, but it might also have had to do with the anxiety I felt.

It was unnerving to fly into a new region so far away (I am speaking of cultural distance, principally) with only two suitcases and the crushing pressure of having to deal with what in all likelihood would be skepticism. For one thing, it felt as if I were submerged underwater, unable to dry out as I quickly drenched my clothing by simply waiting outside for the shuttle bus to the rental car agency. But my first impression of the skies in the Midwest was that they were, quite simply, amazing, and I felt as times as if it was only the weight of that sweat that soaked my clothing that prevented me from flying up and losing myself in their azure clarity. I still treasure the sight of those wide open landscapes, even as I looked around and found myself isolated, missing as I did the omnipresence of Latinos such as myself that I take for granted in California. The prairies were wide open, and I left Missouri to drive west into the Sunflower state.

The blue of the sky seemed to me to be more intense than any I had seen before, with vast and lonely clouds that loomed up majestically, these floating balloons of water that served as projections for my soul. The sky was clearer out here, with none of the haze that we associate with southern California, and it was hypnotic to look up and to see these clouds coalesce into a landscape in the sky, an aerial topography that left me with visions of Greek islands, and with heroes sailing out among them, in pursuit of their own individual quests. I couldn’t help but compare myself with Odysseus, though less hardy, for the heat was thoroughly oppressive as I settled myself for the lonely drive on the two lane highway (one of the narrowest highways I had ever experienced), following Apollo as he drove his chariot into the west.

I arrived in that city in the early evening and immediately noticed the buzz of the cicadas. I didn’t know quite how to characterize it in the beginning, and I am ashamed to admit it now, but thought for some time that it might have been noise produced by the power grid. It would throb over and over, even as it got darker and darker, and it was louder where we found trees. The noise was insistent and reminded me of a B-grade science fiction movie so popular in the 50s, with scientists in medieval castles and arcs of electricity jumping from one node to the next, to be wielded no doubt to give life to another Frankenstein. Of course I quickly realized that it was due to the cicadas, but still, it felt a little eerie, with that feeling that we were in late summer and something was bound to happen. Some cataclysm, perhaps, but also, maybe, some spectacle of wonder. Truth be told, my imagination had already been molded by the science fiction novels and movies I had always enjoyed, and it was quite natural to think of Ursula K. Le Guin novels, of Star Trek episodes, and of Ray Bradbury’s poetic homage to summers, Dandelion Wine.

It is a truism that summers have a certain idyllic quality to them, despite the nervous energy and the air of expectancy that I have described. If we associate winter with decline and conclusion, summers suggest plenitude, the bright moment when action can and should be taken, when we are at the peak of our creative powers, facing with the tantalizing prospect of actualizing possibilities. It is nonetheless a moment, and it does draws inexorably towards its own conclusion, in that final frenetic holiday that is signaled by Labor Day, a holiday that in the United States is putatively associated with a tribute to the working individual, but is denuded of any real political essence and is thoroughly unlike the May Day celebrations held throughout the rest of the world. Labor Day is the last fling of the summer before we settle down and behave like adults, as our parents admonished it was necessary to do.

By the end of August, then, the lazy succession of bright and hot days filled with barbeques and summer projects that we have been undertaking, with books we have been reading and lawns and vegetable gardens we have been cultivating (my summer tomatoes turned out nicely, I might add), and with articles and reviews we have proposed to complete because this is the time that is set aside for academics to pursue their investigations without the interruptions represented by department service, all come to a frenetic conclusion as we come to the realization that, yes, this period is drawing to a close, and the tyranny of the clock will resume. Can we rebel against the end of the summer?

I contemplate once again the need to buy clothes, and the prospect of setting aside the T-shirts and shorts I had been wearing up to this point and striking instead a different sartorial note. This can’t help but remind me of the last futile (but in my mind desperately ennobling) gesture of one of my English professors at UCLA, Lynn Batten, who was a bit of a ham and who arrived at the first lecture of the fall term about twenty years ago looking decidedly unprofessorial in his Bermuda shorts, T-shirt and sneakers, challenging us as he stood in front of the class. “What?!” he exclaimed, “Is the summer over yet? I say NO!”, and we all laughed, we students settling into another evening extension course, and in my case, an engineer who had left behind his job and was planning a career change to pursue the literature degree I had always wanted. His need to proclaim his faith in an eternal summer mirrored my own to justify what I was doing, and to pursue once again another transition, to pick up the elements of a past that I hadn’t been able to fashion correctly, and to proclaim a faith in infinite possibilities. I was a rebel too.

So we gear up for the final swan song for the summer 2013, recognizing as well the symbolic import of this period, and the historical moments we associate with August. Summers have been associated with many personal moments of transition in my life, and there is also the added social dimension that is present in the celebration of the 50^th anniversary (today, August. 30^th), of the speech given by the Reverend Martin Luther King at the Washington Memorial Monument back in 1963. Summer back then had the promise of change, the way it did decades later in Los Angeles during the riots, the way it did on a more personal note when I landed in Kansas City. We sing to the idyllic nature of a season that is grounded in dreams, in vast cloudscapes in the sky, but also in dark moments, in the anger and tension that broods underneath, in the fires that blaze because we need to believe that we can change things, even if it is more difficult that we can imagine to change an institutional framework, an economic system or a cultural outlook (they are all connected, of course). We sing the praises of those idyllic moments, the wafting barbeque smells, the sound of children laughing by the pool, the Mexican immigrant paletero who pushes his cart through the barrios selling Mexican icicle pops, and yes, the cicadas buzzing insistently as the raccoons sort through our trash. And yes, maybe somewhere in the streets of major cities where hope is more muted, in the urban wastelands of Chicago or Oakland or South Central Los Angeles, a bullet also zings its way with a crack in an arc of futility.

We are formed by our social institutions, and by the calendars that define our rituals and routines. We are creatures of habit, after all. But is it also true that we respond to nature, and that this need not be considered an imposition but, instead, an acknowledgement of the cycle of youth, maturity and what I will call senescence, for it is an elegant euphemism. I tell myself that as a society, we still have a ways to go, and that urgency is building once again, especially given the climate of futility that prevails in Washington.  As we prepare to enter the Labor Day weekend, and as our president maneuvers to involve as in yet another Middle East conflict, and as immigration reform stalls in the House of Representatives where any legislation with the slightest progressive edge is sent to die, and when we settle down in a tepid economic recovery that will most likely stall once again due to the machinations of extremists political movements, I can still lose myself to the idyllic pleasure of looking up at the skies during a hot August afternoon, contemplating the beautiful  vista of storm clouds during this time of the year. Summer is, after all, a part of the eternal pageant of giving oneself over to the mythical quest of discovery. Like driving west on Highway 70 in the middle of the vast prairie once again.  

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)