In the past few weeks I’ve tried to do a bunch of summery things in hopes that summer would feel like its work here was done and it could move on down the globe. For starters, I went to a 51s baseball game—boys of summer and all that—sweated my ass off, bought peanuts, risked lumbar herniation on metal bleachers and cheered for Cosmo, the vaguely extraterrestrial, trunkless-elephant mascot.
It was fun during innings one to four. I kept my head squarely in the nostalgia of America’s favorite pastime other than Facebook, refusing to wander into thoughts about Cashman Field’s ailing condition (raw sewage once flooded the dugouts), or whether the team should get a new stadium in Summerlin (meh) or the glaring answer to a recent trivia question: Which sport doesn’t use a clock?
For a few hours/eons, I just enjoyed the crack of the bat and the adorable unsupervised children chasing potentially fatal foul balls into the bleachers. I tried to embrace the hotter-than-f*ck timelessness of it, the idyllic imagery of long summer nights and spittin’ mad managers. But then, like summer and this story and climate change debates, it began to drag on. By the ninth inning, my butt was numb and I had peanut shells in my bra. I was done. But summer wasn’t done with me: The game went 12 innings. When the 51s finally beat Round Rock with a two-run homer, I was thrilled. But I took those three extra innings as a sign that this summer might never end.
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Tennessee Williams’ character Blanche DuBois famously said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” At the time, she was experiencing a psychotic break and being carted off to a mental hospital. Still, the phrase is a keeper. I thought about it the other day when our neighbors texted: “We’re going out of town, feel free to use our pool.”
It was roughly 142 degrees outside—fossil fuels? deforestation? angry deity?—so my girlfriend and I grabbed our cooler and floats and moved into their backyard. The pool was brisk and life-affirming. But a sad thing happened one night while we were swimming in the kindness of strangers: When I turned the pool light on, I inadvertently also turned on the gas-burning pool heater. In August. In Las Vegas.
A baseball-hour or two later, the pool was no longer cool nor life-affirming; it was a sweat bath that could kill off Australia’s coral reefs and 70 percent of freshwater fish. I freaked out.
I tracked down the pool guy to depend on his kindness. He stood in their backyard and belly-laughed—“You HEATED it? In THIS weather?” I imagined blankets of algae blooming as the once-kind neighbors returned. But the pool guy reassured me. It would, in fact, probably survive my carelessness and cool off overnight. As I hoped their vacation went into extra innings; I pleaded with Mother Earth again to forgive my growing carbon footprint and wrap up this miserable summer.
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When that didn’t happen, we escaped to 75-degree Mt. Charleston and rode the ski lift up Lee Canyon. “Reconnect with nature while cruising up to 9,300 feet” says the ski resort’s website. It’s about a 30-minute relaxing ride through the pines, offering majestic views and, on this day, a cool breeze.
After taking a few pictures, I closed my eyes and listened to the birds, and began to believe that Earth would survive our recklessness and delay our extinction a few more years. Indeed, if we respect nature, maybe nature won’t melt us or drown us. I had almost drifted off when I heard a little boy in an oncoming chair yell out to us: “Hey, there’s bras in that tree! Did you see them?” He was about 6 and thrilled about his simultaneous lessons in botany and debauchery. His dad kept his head down.
The bra tree, like the panty tree at many a ski resort, is a lucky pine that gets decorated with reveling skiers’ cast-off undergarments. It’s fun, ish, right? Yet when I looked at the tree’s limbs tangled up in our fun, I wondered if we would ever see the bigger picture. And I prepared for more heat.
