Saturday afternoon, I experienced a most unusual sensation out my windows: Silence. After a raucous couple of months on our tree-lined streets, our urban forest supporting a full-screech reproductive orgy, the cicadas are finally finishing their business and mercifully dying off. They’re not completely gone, but the stillness was a soothing surprise and a balm to the ears, almost as big a shock as another unusual sensation last Wednesday evening: Coolness to the point of chilly.
We have tipped into a new season: Late Summer/Early Fall.
There is no denying that climate change is upon us. The summers we knew, and that some of us cherished, are rapidly being replaced by 90-degree days, intense humidity, and wildfire smoke from elsewhere. You could feel it coming each summer, little by little, but this summer it arrived in force.
The changing climate has reconfigured our seasons. There are still four, but they have morphed into overlapping hybrids: Late Summer/Early Fall (August-September-October), Late Fall/Early Winter (November-December-January), Late Winter/Early Spring (February-March-April), and Late Spring/Early Summer (May-June-July).
Deep Winter, relatively snowless, has shrunk to January (or Late January/Early February) and High Summer has been reduced to July (or Late July/Early August). Summer this year became an inverted Winter, shutting us up in our homes as we took refuge in our air-conditioned shelters, producing a new kind of cabin fever.
It’s not just the weather. We seem to be perpetually in between. Late Baseball/Early Football. Late Childhood/Early Adolescence (my grandsons and, in many ways, our entire culture). Late Young Adult/Early Middle Age (my son). We are a shifting population of Late Boomers/Early Gen Alphabet Soup. We are becoming a nation of “go-betweens.”
Now that we have wrecked the climate, we find ourselves between Holocene and Anthropocene (human-centered) epochs. Late Earth Dwellers/Early Planetary Colonizers.
Now that the Visigoths and Vandals have sacked D.C., we are sandwiched between a once-civilized nation and a broken, fractured mess, yet to be determined. Late Democracy/Early Autocracy. Late Lincoln/Early Trump. Or in the evangelical language of MAGA, Late Christ/Early Anti-Christ. The Church of the Latter-Day Ain’ts.
Now that Artificial Intelligence is taking over, we are Late Homo Sapiens/Early Homo Algorithm — that is to say, Late Human/Early AI.
And here in the community news business, we are officially a Late Newsroom/Early Remote publication.
We’re living on the cusp, Late Now/Early Next, the threshold of a Brave/Not-So-Brave New World. And we have been chosen by destiny to serve as the go-betweens. The transitionals. The torch-passers. The Nextras.
A dubious distinction, Late Rock/Early Hard Place.
We may object to living in a world on the verge, but change is in motion. What’s coming is coming. Ready or not, here we go.
But Next World is not quite here yet. So as betweeners, we live in two worlds. Our task is to complete the voyage from Now to Next.
What will we take from the old and bring to the new? Will it be the best of both worlds or the worst of both … or both?
There is an upside to being between, particularly with seasons — the excitement of change and the possibility of a refresh — ripeness, leading to decline, leading to renewal in the cycle of life.
But we’ve reached a point of no return. There’s no going back. We have created a new, more hostile climate. The Earth is in transition. There is no status quo. Everything is past prime or heading toward some new primetime, where extremes are the new norm.
Takes getting used to. A lot of getting used to. And being well adjusted in a dysfunctional, dehumanizing era is not exactly a virtue.
The virtue we need most is balance — as we walk the tightwire across the canyon connecting Late Past to Early Future.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it: Make the most of this and fashion the best of all possible worlds.
On the bright side, the cicadas are finally settling down. At least we can hear ourselves think. And we can sleep with open windows — out of which the only sound is the ethereal stardust melody of crickets. And the siren song of ambulances.
And as Brook Benton sang, the distant moaning of a train, playing a sad refrain to the night.