Heat Dome

The sky in Texas, even in the middle of a city like the city Houston, is almost always a blue dome. This is its magic.  Since moving here, I have brought images of that sky with me as I travel. I look up at the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and see, beyond the figures, not just blueness, but the shape, its topmost curve just out of reach of my fading eyesight and the camera lens on my phone. Looking up, the height of the ceiling registers in the strain of my neck; the blue comes cascading down to meet and soothe me. It is not—quite—that I am enveloped since I have to make a point of looking up, but I am, somehow included in the grand sweep of the design. The experience gets repeated in countless smaller and less famous churches in Sicily, where the outside air can feel like Texas. When I enter a church, I walk slowly around the perimeter, and then back again to the entrance saving the dome above th altar for last. The painting could be figural: a Christo Pancrator holding a book, or a crucifixion scene, but sometimes there is just a painted sky full of stars.

Coming home, after a summer vacation, I first feel the blast of wet heat on the jetway, then the chill of airport air-conditioning, then the dark humidity of the parking garage. Settled into my seatbelt I wait as the car moves forward to see the tangled mass of concrete that signals the outskirts of Houston and look up to see the sky meet the highway, craning my neck to see it through the closed window and the tinted glass. The sky here is stubbornly depopulated, removed by more space than I can comprehend from the trucks moving below it. No Adam, no Jesus, no gold leaf, just a blue that I might call cerulean except that the word sounds too much like a paint or heaven and not enough like being in traffic.

Now—and for the last 30 days—the dome over southeast Texas has been a heat dome. I am not the family weather expert, and I think that my husband, who is, has given up in the face of this particular weather (that is to say climate) crisis. TV meteorologists show the dome as a red, or sometimes purple circle, mostly stationary over the map of Texas and, sometimes, Louisiana. The accompanying temperature charts show a terrifying sameness: day after day of 100-degree highs and almost 90-degree lows. Clicking from one channel to the other in search of better news, we hear over and over again that we are unlikely to break the record set in 2011, where there were 46 such days. So far, there have been only 21 3-digit days this summer. All this, and no record. The TV weathermen and women seem depressed; while you can hear in their voices a pale echo of the excitement they display for a hurricane or even a tropical storm, mostly they are defeated at having to say the same thing over and over again. All this and no plot. On channel 2, the station we watch most often, Frank Billingsley has stopped being enthusiastic about the photos of dogs and sunsets that viewers send him. Another puppy, another spectacular view over Galveston Bay, another 100-degree day. On our local favorite website, Space City Weather (“Hype-free Forecasts for the Houston Area”), Eric Berger and Matt Lanza search for something new to say, aware that they simply cut and paste from day to day and week to week. A source of comfort and rationality before and during hurricanes, the website is virtually useless. Eric and Matt Lanza, as many Houstonians have come to call them in times of trouble, are tired too. There have been a few days, not many, when the site can use new words, when the forecast includes verbs: the heat dome sometimes “moves” or “wobbles” to the west, allowing for the possibility (10 percent, 20 percent?) of a localized rain shower. It has not rained on my garden since early July.

Looking at the map, and the circle that surrounds east Texas, I resort to what is for me a rare instance of three-dimensional thinking. The circle becomes a dome, and the dome opens up to take in all of space. We are, after all, Space City. The dome, as I see it even without closing my eyes, is not cerulean, not bright blue, but white and translucent, like a tent. I imagine floating up to the top of it, slashing the material— canvas or clouds—of which it is made. I itch to cut a hole in the dome, to let the water I feel must be up there come pouring down on Houston, on my garden, on my hibiscus and tomatillos, my roses and mint.

Because meteorologists have so little to say about this summer, I am constantly reminded of the that record-breaking summer of 2011, the summer before the summer my son was diagnosed with cancer, the summer before the summer my giant labradoodle died of cancer and was replaced by my beloved miniature version, Sydney the goldendoodle. In this cluster of “befores” I am moved to remember 2011, a year wiped out, washed clean for me by the one that followed.

It was not the heat I remember, but the drought. 2011 was was the summer I learned to use gray water on the garden. First it was pasta water, or water in which I had cooked vegetables. Then it was slightly soapy water, then water with little bits of food in it, then, desperately, coffee. The garden, perhaps perked up by caffeine and my constant attention, thrived as never before. That year Houston took on the feel of a desert town—very hot in the day but strangely cool at night. The lavender and rosemary thought they were in Provence and grew enormous. The various gray-leaved plants that Houston gardeners are told to avoid and plant anyway got all Hill Country on us, and grew out and up. It felt like elsewhere… My skin felt dry, my soul felt parched. I rubbed oils and balms into my skin.

This summer is different and not better. It feels like Houston only more so.  I am back hauling gray water from the kitchen and bathtub, but the garden is not thriving. Most of the plants have so far survived, but they, like the weather, have stayed eerily the same from day to day and week to week. They have not yet died, but they are the same size and shape that they were a month ago, as if I had given up and some hot night substituted plastic plants for real ones.

It feels a little like lockdown. Friends, if they come at all, come late to dinner after the glare is gone and the flame-shaped solar lights burn in the flower beds. The metal of my car burns my skin and hurst my eyes.  I plan my car trips to work and to the grocery around the heat and glare of the day and circle Houston’s vast concrete parking lots looking for fleeting patches of shade. We walk the dogs at dusk to avoid scorching their paws on the way to the park.   I never look up because the sun is too bright, but I know the dome is there, high in the sky and shaping the summer and all the small things I do.

So far, I have spoken as if the heat affects only me, my plants, and my gardens. I have used the possessive more times than I like to admit. This is part of the problem with personal narratives and with the first-person singular. It is also a problem, as I hope I have made clear over the last three years, with the idea of “home.” Bounded by fences, walls, or property lines, “homes” disconnect us from others, directing us to think on the small and easily accessed scale of the household. Moving out from that scale can be terrifying: each day as my garden warms and my car bakes in the heat, I try and fail to imagine the problem on the unimaginable scale of global climate change. Climate change is what my colleague Tim Morton has called a “hyoperobject” something too big to get your head around. It pushes us to think behind our own sweating bodies to Argentina, which recently experienced a 100-degree day in winter, to Maui, to small island nations and archipelagos like Tuvalu and Micronesia, battling rising seas. We have to think in terms of ice floes and water flows, ocean currents, animals and plants, cloud formations, and energy production. We also, I think, would do well to think about a medium scale—in my case the city outside my door.

For me, the medium scale, the imaginable effect of climate change, is not the heat dome but the heat island. Most of us know that heat islands are urban neighborhoods or areas where the temperatures are hotter than others, someties as much as 20 degrees hotter. These “islands” typically have more concrete and fewer trees and grassy areas. Not surprisingly, heat islands are often poorer areas of the city. As one helpful article notes, the Science Museum of Virginia led a study in 2020 that concluded that “formerly redlined communities are warmer than neighboring non-redlined areas in 94% of the cities studied.” Poverty, heat islands, and heat-related deaths and illnesses are all highly correlated. Houston is one of the five worst cities for heat islands, with a low percentage of city covered by tree canopy, and with “a roughly 14% tree cover discrepancy” between high- and low-income neighborhoods.  Like so many “natural” events, so many “Acts of God,” the heat dome has unequal effects; we are perhaps living under many little domes, on differently vulnerable but ultimately precarious islands, all created by by humans.