Exiting the rainiest winter in years, we are now faced with a marine layer seemingly as impenetrable as a bulletproof vest.
Remember when June gloom was a condition as temporary as teen acne? Well, that got pushed back to another, now-familiar rhyme, May gray. Let’s hope we don’t have to find depressing rhymes for July, August or September.
Could this sheet metal roof continue across the state for all those months? Global warming? I dunno.
I first heard that term along with a warning that we the people were cooking ourselves when I was at Maui Community College in 1969. The professor said we had 30 years left on the outside, before the world got third-degree burns.
Of course, they didn’t listen to the settled science, and each day for years I went to the beach looking for signs that sea levels were rising. I wouldn’t have taken a beachfront house in Del Mar if you gave it to me. (Okay, maybe if you gave it to me, even though I figured it was on loan and the balloon payment for burning all those fossil fuels was about to come due.)
I was called an extremist after I quit driving my car, using plastics and eating meat. I had become a global warming evangelist. I was convinced, but noting, not even a doubling of gas prices could break my friends’ four-wheel, one-person-in-one-car dependence.
And there was no pushback at all against the cutting of trees, the housing tract boom or the paving of large tracks of land. By the time I gave up, deciding I could not beat them and would join them, the gas-guzzling, plastic-wrapped meatheads of the world, they had all switched to electric cars while waving vegan forefingers in my face.
What to do? Well, I still detest plastic, try to moderate my driving, all the while hoping to leave a smaller footprint than the average flatulent sasquatch. I have eliminated most everything that might contribute to greenhouse gases except for exhaling.
Still as good as I try to be, and even with our combined Earth Day green resolutions, on this May 15, the day of this writing, the temperature has barely cracked 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the same temperature as the ocean.
It’s currently clear and 75 degrees in Cabo San Lucas. Mainland Mexico and Hawaii are probably even warmer.
Then there are those remote regions of the world that my friend Giles told me about. Places where the ocean never falls below 75 and the skies are not cloudy all day. Of course, there are bugs, sharks, long rainy seasons and the occasional government overthrow to contend with.
Right now, however, I don’t care. I will do just about anything to enjoy a few weeks of good, old-fashioned summer.
