Passing Time in the Merciless Inferno
Reflections on a week living under the ‘Heat Dome’ and the future of climate change
A sign announces that the theme today at daycare is ‘Global Warming’. The accompanying drawing of a happy sun seems suspiciously menacing. By the entrance, a dozen preschoolers in floppy hats, cheeks and arms smeared with sunscreen prepare for the park. My three-year-old sits on the bench, his expression watchful. The expedition is delayed as the staff attends to a distraught girl with something approximating an Apple watch on her tiny wrist. “It’ll be okay,” we all agree, “It’s a beautiful day out there.” The sun shines. It is 20 degrees Celsius in Vancouver.
That was a week before the temperature cranked to record-breaking highs, and only a couple weeks after we tagged our complaints of chilly weather with ‘Junuary’.
When we first heard there would be a heat wave, I researched portable air conditioners. My efforts were half-hearted, deterred by high price tags, and my general skepticism around the sorcery of forecasting anything with accuracy. How hot could it get, really? I thought. Somewhere in my phone, there is a browser window open with a unit costing half a month of daycare secured in a cart. If I were to refresh the page, it would reveal itself to be out of stock, but left untouched it remains, a ghost of past indecision. I walk by my neighbours, noting the cardboard fitted to their windows with hoses expelling the heat. Will we be the first to tape up the tinfoil?
At 32 degrees Celsius, I bike to the drug store. The heat has turned the afternoon blue, the stagnancy of the air making everything dream-like. I linger too long in the air conditioning. I wander the aisles staring at things and quickly realize there are other people doing this. All of us carry stray objects like a disguise, the cool temperature making us stoned and careless. What is there to go back to out there? Only certain death, I think. I buy tiny replacement bulbs for the nightlights that have been burnt out for most of the year and feel a rush from my productivity.
In the evening, we tell the children they are having a sleepover in the basement. It is the only hospitable part of our townhouse. They are excited. On Instagram, a friend’s teenager lays in a hammock with an icepack over his eyes.
We stay up way too late mixing drinks, pretending we are in Mexico or Thailand, somewhere where the heat would make sense. My partner walks around in his swim trunks. In our bedroom on the top floor, we lay flanked by two tower fans volleying the heat back and forth over our sweat-drenched sheets. We are in agreement that there will be no touching.
The morning is just as hot. The parking lot of Canadian Tire is a fever of SUVs, sizzling metal, and the smell of gasoline. They are sold out of water guns. A woman with a kid in a tropical-print bathing suit passes clutching an armload of pool noodles. A man stands in front of a $600 Dyson fan with his eyes closed.
I hit the next store, walking several blocks across an expanse of concrete, worrying the soles of my sandals will melt to the sidewalk and I will be trapped until nightfall. But there are no Freezies left at Superstore. The empty shelf fills me with an unwarranted sense of doom. I flashback to the ransacked rice section at this very store at the beginning of the pandemic, then wonder if experiencing PTSD caused by instances of limited consumer selection is the sign of a truly charmed life. I stare at a bag of pre-cut frozen pineapple chunks in shame. I do not want to leave the refrigerator aisle. Outside it is 37C.
Climate ‘events’ were not the kind of events I was looking forward to after months of pandemic, I think in the line up at the coffee shop. My chin is wet under the mask. I order a coffee.
‘Iced,’ I say meaningfully.
‘Of course,’ says the barista. The goose bumps on my shoulders are exhilarating.
In the shade of the water park, the temperature has dropped to 34C. The song of the ice cream truck cuts through the malaise and the kids turn rabid. Everything melts at triple the speed, blue and red sugar-ice sliding down popsicle sticks into the grass, arms sticky with streams of vanilla. The driver turns off the music and fans himself with cash.
I receive a text asking parents to donate fans for the children’s classroom. Then I receive an email that school is cancelled due to the heat. In the house we grow delirious, faces slick. “Imagine you are standing by the ocean,” I tell the kids, misting them with a spray bottle.
Finally, it is dark, and with the children asleep in the cave of the basement, we turn on Fubar 2. It is a movie about two loveable Canadian dirtbags trying to get their lives together in Fort McMurray. The landscape shots are mostly filmed at night, showing the smoke from industrial chimneys creating an artificial sky.
“Why does it look like that? It’s like a hellscape,” I say.
My partner stares at me incredulously. “They are extracting bitumen from thousands of acres of land. What did you think that would look like?”
I give him the side-eye and sip my beverage, an approximation of tinto de verano made with lemon soda and red box wine. It is not so unlike the version I drank in a small town in southern Spain. But that was a decade ago, in the Before Time.
Lying in bed, I imagine the Heat Dome is a smothering blanket. ‘Is this the apocalypse?’ I whisper to the night. My skin feels tacky and malleable, like it might change form. ‘Will there be fire?’
But in the morning, we wake to a breeze pushing on the blinds. It is 21C. We blink in confusion. ‘Is it over?’ I say aloud. We scan the headlines on our phones. The Heat Dome is shifting east. Like a super villain, it seeks more victims — a narcissist, on a killing spree. I sip water leisurely now that the temperature in my kitchen is tolerable. I examine the wall calendar where I have marked off weeks of summer camps and weekend trips. I allow myself to wonder, just for a moment, when the next event will come.
