Pattern and Forecast

This is the first entry in a new series in which writers give a report on the weather. Any meteorological statements made may range from the personal to the scientific, from observable weather to the felt.

Summer began in a squall, with Stormy Daniels and bouts of rain. It drizzled throughout June in New York and was cold. I thought of the adult film star’s feud with Rudy Giuliani as the sign under which this summer 2018 was born—ominous, yet a birth with strong character. The president’s addled lawyer had said, “How could she be damaged?” Who among us wasn’t? I left in the middle of the month and went to stay on Lake Geneva with a handsome friend who lives in a squat near the water. (Squats are subsidized by the city, go figure.) We sat in his yard while bats beat the hot air above us. We zipped through cigarettes, drank bad whiskey, listened to the pleas of a woman who was, tragically enough, in love with my friend’s roommate. She had come from some far city beyond the Alps to beg her disinterested ex-girlfriend for reconciliation, but to no avail. I had seen that teary face before: shattered by refusal. The air sweated around her. Love, like weather, sweeps us up.

Summer can be so sentimental: you either fall in love or out of it. I failed to do the former and managed the latter only once, but I’ll spare the record his name. Prolonged exposure to the sun produces a hormonal spurt in our bodies, and this is why we change most from June to August. Perhaps this is why so many of us fall in or out of love then, too, usually only feeling the results of it in fall. Coming into September, you’re refreshed, anew. Jacolby told me he “felt the winds of autumn” in July. I suppose it’s a state of mind, between equinox and solstice.

We were in a heatwave, and Europe was burning. Fire ate through Greece, Sweden. Fire ate through California, too, and probably other landscapes in other countries I have no immediate connection to, except through the flows of news. The Spanish novelist Javier Marías writes that landscape brings repose only to those who are weary. I sank into earth wherever I went, though I was never tired, only lonely: I sank into the cold water of Lake Geneva, the desert of southern California, the buggy Swedish countryside, unseasonably warm England, and finally Montana, wreathed in smoke from the torched west. In each the wind, the sound of night was different—this is weather. I cycled through American states and European countries across the summer, for friends and for work,...