A writer's dispatch from Utah captures the increasingly common experience of living with extreme heat.
 | By Eliza Barclay Climate Editor, Opinion |
This summer's intense, extended heat waves around the world have changed the landscape and daily rhythms in myriad ways. In Phoenix, saguaro cactuses collapsed and runners resorted to training outdoors at 4 a.m., long before the height of the day's heat. In Texas, heat-related illness has plagued towns like Laredo and dead fish have appeared on Gulf Coast beaches. |
For the Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams, enduring 47 days of above-100-degree heat in her home in the red rock desert this summer produced striking observations of her environment and her state of mind. The dry heat, for instance, allowed insects to flourish. "Walking through thigh-high grass in the valley creates clouds of grasshoppers moving like an army advancing in the heat of war," she wrote last week in a guest essay. "I can't think, I can only watch what is before me: a tarantula hawk wasp with a blue-black body and bright orange wings draped over its ominous stinger. My eyes focus as it drags a four-inch green locust across our porch at a rapid clip." Then she describes the erosion of her mind and body: "You feel you have become worthless, listless, prostrate for much of the afternoon, watching clouds as you pray for rain." |
When rain finally came, she turned to the weather gods, worried about the future. "I will never leave, please don't make me leave, what if we are forced to leave?" It's a question that many in the warmer regions of the world may ponder in the summers to come. |
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