A photo montage with a blank notebook and a pencil, and Julia Richards smiling.
Julia Richards
"Close that shade!” my dad would admonish me if sun was pouring through the window when he came in from working outside in the summertime.
I grew up in a farmhouse without air conditioning. I learned to close all the windows in the morning before the air heated up and close all the shades when the sun reached those windows. In the evening, we would reverse the process, opening everything up to get a cool cross breeze airing out the house.
I no longer live in a farmhouse in the country, but I have impressed a few city slickers with my ability to keep the indoors 5-10 degrees cooler than outdoors sans air conditioning.
This doesn’t work so well if you can’t open the windows at night. That’s what I ran into this summer with the wildfire smoke.
Even with windows closed, the first night the Air Quality Index went into the “very unhealthy” category, I woke at 2 a.m. and thought I smelled smoke. My upper chest was tight, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe well. I’m still unsure whether I was actually being affected by the pollution, or having a mild panic attack.
I was on vacation in Rhinelander when another plume of wildfire smoke moved through Wisconsin. Instead of the northern pines, we smelled smoke. What was meant to be a day out on the water or lazily chatting on the beach had to be rethought. Summer is supposed to be the time for northerners to relish the caress of balmy air on bare skin, abandon the stovetop for the grill, and leave the living room for some lawn chairs.
I’ve never been one for heat, and when it gets bad enough in the summertime I retreat inside, even in years when the air isn’t filled with smoke. I sometimes feel I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, just as much in the summer as in the dark and cold of winter. I imagine there were a lot of people experiencing SAD in southern states in the brutal heat this summer.
Adding to the sense of dread is the suspicion that this is the “new normal,” to use a phrase we’ve all come to hate. You don’t like it this hot? Well, it’s only going to get worse, we’re told. The news is a litany of wildfires, drought, epic floods, and record after record broken for heat. The climate disasters, though predicted, continue to catch me off guard. Who knew Hawaii could even have wildfires? Paradise transformed to hell in a matter of hours.
When I described this sense of doom to my partner, he coined the term Climate-Related Affective Pathology, or CRAP. “Pathology” seems a bit strong, but I’m hard pressed to find something more accurate starting with “p.” “Perturbation?”
So now, when I’m perturbed about some manifestation of the climate crisis, and it’s bringing me down or making me anxious, I say I’m feeling CRAP-y.
CRAP is really just an offshoot of SAD. Last winter’s warm and snowless January didn’t allow for much cross-country skiing, ice skating or lake walking. My go-to strategy for combating winter blues — getting outside to exercise — was thwarted by climate change. The double whammy of a load of CRAP hitting the SAD fan.
At the autumnal equinox I will start using my light box in the mornings. It’s part of my strategy for dealing with the shorter days. Maybe I need to come up with strategies for dealing with CRAP as well. How do people get through the winter in say, southern Illinois, if that’s what Madison’s winter climate is to become?
My therapist tells me it takes five positive thoughts to override one negative one, as we humans have a natural bias toward the negative. This is clearly going to take some work. I don’t feel I can just keep my head in the sand and never consume news, even if the string of climate disasters becomes overwhelming.
For now, my go-to positives are close to home. I have solar panels on my roof. I watch on an app how much electricity they are producing as well as how much I am consuming and try to reduce the latter as much as possible. I take solace in observing the fellow living beings that share my postage stamp of a yard — the birds and beetles, wild bees and occasional monarch. I enjoy the harvest of my garden — tomatoes as fresh and local as it gets. I add to the bin of compost that slowly condenses into soil to be spread back onto the garden, shrinking my contribution to the landfill at least a tiny bit. I water the new trees in the school yard across the street, hoping that the investment of my time and energy now while they are young will eventually mean I can enjoy their shade and air cleaning capabilities. That’s five things. Enough to keep me afloat for now.
Julia Richards likes to write about health and environmental issues. She lives with her son in Madison. Photo by Valerie Tobias.
If you are interested in writing a personal essay for Isthmus, query Lindaf@isthmus.com.
