Heat

I could feel the asphalt radiating yesterday's heat back into the cooler morning air as I began my run this morning. It was a memory of yesterday's triple digit temperatures and a harbinger of more today. In the first mile from my home, I came across 3 vehicles idling. One was in a driveway, empty, the other two were minivans by the curbside, each with a younger male occupant. Ten minutes later, the empty one was gone, but the minivans remained. I can only guess that the occupants preferred the air conditioning preferable to the moist 63 F morning air. 20 minutes later, one of the minivans was still idling curbside, its occupant presumably waiting for a passenger.

I found irony in this comfortable consumption of irreplaceable fossil fuel during the summer that will be most remembered for BP's oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The lust for cheap gas is poisoning the Gulf. If the oil slick makes the Keys, the reefs, which took hundreds of thousands of years to grow, will be destroyed in days.

The sun broke the horizon this morning as a dark red disk the color of clay.