Seattle's heat wave got mocked today by two people I know and love from the Midwest and the East Coast. Specifically, these are the people who mock me whenever Seattle has odd weather of any kind.
Look, Seattle is one of the mildest climates in the world - we have lots of misty rain and moisture, and two of the best investments you can make when you move here are a warm, easy-to-dry hat of wool felt and a windbreaker. The mist is one thing that most people don't understand - you go through windshield wipers but you never deal with pour-down rain, and if a pour-down happens, we slow down not because of the sheer volume of water, but because once water hits the road, the accumulation makes the surface slippery from the run-off. But we don't have massive, thumping heat and we don't have massive blankets of snow that stick around. Which is good, because we don't prepare for either of those. There's no real point.
T's old boss used to give her crap about people missing work because of snow until he came out from the East Coast and couldn't understand why he couldn't get out of the company parking lot due to the sheet of ice that ran down the 8% grade hill.
We live in a mountainous area, and one of the geographical features happens to be hills and mountains and rivers. We also live in a volcanic region, and while the moist air that comes over the Puget Sound is laden with fresh oceanic ions, it's also loaded with rain and moisture. Seattle never gets thunderstorms in the same way that a Kansas college town might - we have tsunami warnings, not tornadoes. And we do not have FLAT surfaces, except when it comes to water.
Every time Seattle gets mocked by someone who doesn't live here, I wonder why they even bother. Our weather is so moderate that when it goes to the extreme and people lose their heads completely, it's completely understandable. We raid the stores for fans. Our grumpiness and crankiness increases exponentially. The people in the kitchens are overloaded and sweaty and service in your favorite restaraunts slide.
We do not like climate change. It's why we live here. Oh, we pay for it with the rain and the mist, but when it snows, it melts. When it melts here, it refreezes into sheets of ice. Those sheets are on top of hills.
We don't have flat land and passive heat sinks combined with industrial freon blocks in front of our houses combined with intentional windbreaks of trees. We don't have flat roads with salt and sand trucks that flood our flat 0 degree plane roads to make it possible for us to drive to work. We barely have enough snowplows to do more than four main roads when it DOES snow.
So to you Midwesterners who've been happily snarking at us out here, panting our way through a 101 heatwave without air conditioning, swamp coolers, massive movieplexes and more "traditional" Americana methods of cooling off, I can only say:
Shut up. No, really. If you don't know what the feel of a forest fire on your face and the heat of a dry, crackling Washington summer at your back feels like, if you can't smell the algae blooms of the ocean water as the heat converts the promordial goo in it to slime, and if your entire experience of summer involves running straight from air conditioned car to air conditioned garage to air conditioned office or home, you get NO mockery leniency.
Of course, this is hugely influenced by the fact that I'm sitting clad in a pair of knit shorts with two fans blowing full bore over me and T, and hoping for any breeze at all to come wafting, cool and light over the Puget Sound to make us feel even remotely cooler. Tomorrow, I may well do all my work in the morning and siesta the rest of the day.
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