It is very hot in Humptulips County, with temperatures in the mid-90’s. Hot spells never last long in the Northwest, since we are too far North and too close to the sea for them to be sustainable for any appreciable time. When they do occur, they encourage locals to engage in traditional forms of sun-worship common to the tropics in a self-conscious manner, since such acts seems vaguely louche in a region where bare human skin is not a common outdoor sight. All of our hot spells are inevitably accompanied by a Greek chorus complaining about the difficulty of sleeping in homes without the benefit of air-conditioning, and even the most ardent sun-worshippers may be found among its loudest participants.
Last night I sat for several minutes in the shade of our back patio simply for the pleasure of soaking in the evening’s heat. Our patio is shaded by the overhang of the library and is a quiet place where fair-skinned persons like me can enjoy a Summer evening. Unlike the expansive views from our front porch across our fields, the view from the back patio is much more intimate, consisting as it does of Helen’s white garden and the small patch of yard which serves as a visual doormat to the forest of alders and pines covering the hillside immediately behind our home. Because of its intimacy, I often sit here for a few moments on nights when I am feeling introspective, for it is a perfect place in which to consider my own thoughts and to speculate whether they possess any merit.
My attempt at reflection last evening was almost immediately disrupted by my startled recognition that absolutely nothing, except insects, was moving in the oppressive heat. Only the faint, occasional twitch of a plastic ribbon hanging from a nearby boundary stake gave any hint that the heavy, viscous air might be amenable to some form of movement. The stillness was life-stealing, as if all living things in my backyard were congregants of an Egyptian temple dedicated to Ra sharing a time of rapture – a moment of communal epiphany so profound as to render each individual life form into an impersonal, objectified representation of its own genus incapable of either movement or speech. I, too, was rendered motionless in the presence of a stillness deep enough to freeze-frame life, with only my thoughts demonstrating any vitality.
And in this stillness flew insects going about their daily rounds, seemingly immune to the life-stealing aspects of the heat. Being the only apparent movement, the insects became focal points upon the canvas of the evening, calling attention to its various components by their attendance: bees investigated Helen’s flowers, calling attention to the variety of their colors and shapes; butterflies flitted randomly about, contrasting nicely with the subtler greens of the bushes and low-growing plants; a lone dragonfly engaged in pointless pursuit, gracing, en passant, intermittent blocks of sunshine and shadow with its neon colors. Occasionally an insect would alight upon one of Helen’s longer-stemmed flowers, causing its stalk to dip with the insect’s weight – a form of enforced movement strikingly at odds with the flower’s otherwise adamantine stillness.
All moments such as this have their fleeting aspect, and I eventually returned indoors to the pleasures of my current book after several minutes of sharing this rapture. But it is equally true that all moments such as this possess a persistent vitality which compels close examination of one’s place in the hierarchy of living things, an examination which suggests that all life is sacrosanct and that the worth of any individual form of life, whether that of a single-celled organism or that of a multi-cellular aggregation, is wholly dependent upon, and wholly derived from, its assumed role within the community of all living things.
