In Search of a Real Summer

Tomorrow, July begins. That means I am sitting in my dim cell with one more column to go. Just one more column is what the turnkey in this place says is required to get me sprung on summer parole. One more column, one more idea.

Actually, I am hoping that something will come sailing over the transom. Sometimes you get lucky that way. You’re looking for a column and all of a sudden this thing sails over the transom and lands on the floor with a plunk.

A letter, say, from George Deukmejian offering to tell where he put all those billions that were supposed to be in the state budget. If a letter like that came over the transom I could write a column saying where the billions were and then everything would be OK and we wouldn’t have to tax our snacks after all.

Or maybe a video of a dog named Walter who predicts earthquakes by pawing the ground with his front feet. This would be timely and I’m sure the turnkey would accept it as a suitable column justifying my release.

But no letters and no Walter. We have hit high summer, the dead zone for columnizing, and the over-the-transom business is very slow. George Deukmejian is probably pulling some slots in Laughlin and not caring a whit about our upcoming snack tax. And Walter, I guess, is resting after Friday.

Maybe no one should try to columnize about California during high summer. Many years ago Mark Twain faced this problem. He had lived in California for about 10 years and had written all he knew to write. Finally, one summer, he decided that he had seen enough of the brown hills and had breathed enough of the dusty air.

He wanted out. He wanted to go some place where the hills were covered in their summer green, where there were thunder clouds. A place where it rained.

It was not that Twain disliked California. His years here had been some of the best of his life, and he even considered San Francisco his home. It was the presence of a real summer that he missed.

In a San Francisco summer, Twain wrote, a man could freeze to death. In Sacramento, he would fry in the rainless heat. And along the North Coast, where Twain had spent much time, he could search in vain for an ocean shore that was perpetually covered by fog.

I’m not sure Twain ever saw the southern beaches. In any case, I don’t think it would have made much difference. He simply needed the kind of summer he could not get in California.

And so do I. If only the turnkey will let me out. Actually, the place I have in mind has not only a summer with rain and an ocean shore but also a humidity of 98% on a good day and those kind of bench-pressing mosquitoes that breed in the green woods.

This would be the tidewater of Virginia, a place where you can sweat in the summer simply by walking out the front door. A place with no Disneyland and no Malibu, a place where the nearest beach draws about six people a day.

In this place the tomatoes don’t get hauled over the Grapevine in 18-wheelers that jack-knife on the 405. They’re grown just outside of town. When you buy tomatoes in the tidewater, sometimes they’re still warm from the fields.

I remember being there once when it hadn’t rained for two weeks, and everyone was worried about the tomatoes. Vegetable crops there actually depend on the rain, a quaint notion. And when a downpour finally hit a couple of days later, I overheard one of the locals say he was relieved to see that the drought had ended. It would have made you smile.

But, in general, you get the idea. The tidewater is a place with a summer, the kind that happens everywhere in the world except California. You can breathe it, you feel it seeping through your skin. Mark Twain eventually traveled to Hartford, Conn., to get his. For me, the tidewater will do just fine.

But to get there, first I have to get out of here. Just a few more words now. The turnkey is eyeing me nervously. He doesn’t think I am going to make it.

Little does he know. The computer counts us out at 785 words, which means we are fast closing on 800 words, the columnist’s irreducible minimum. How should we finish? (792 words) Singing a few bars of “Summertime”? (798 words)

Actually, it (800) won’t be necessary.

Back soon.

Robert A. Jones will be on vacation the month of July. His column will resume July 31.