Tuesday 15 July 2003

Pic of the day: Baby trees in the sun. They become more useful when they grow up. Especially on days like these ...

Hot summer days

I'm sure that the summer heat here is rather moderate compared to where some of you people live, like California or Texas. But for Norway, it is unbearably hot. I don't have a thermometer outside, so I don't know how hot it is there. But inside it is close to body temperature with the curtains drawn and windows open. I don't have any kind of air conditioning, of course; this is Norway, heat is not normally our problem! Luckily the water is still cold, and occasionally I will have more water on my head and my naked skin (which is pretty near all of it) when I'm in here.

Luckily the workplace has a kind of cooling. You don't get blasted with cold air, but there are areas that conduct heat and are connected to a cooling system, so the heat is leeched out of the room gradually. Nice. Of course, when I open the door from work to the street, it is pretty dramatic. People call cities "concrete jungle", but I have long thought of them as man-made deserts. The dry and lifeless dusty heat is just what I associate with deserts. Of course, I would not really know. We don't have any other deserts here.

The forest is certainly not like that. Then again, it is not a tropical rain forest. It's mostly leafy trees like elm and oak and ash, stuff like that; birches and some pines in the hillsides facing north. I have read some figures long ago on what a tree can drink in a day, I am pretty sure it was more than my weight at least. Evaporating that much water takes a lot of heat, so even on a blasting hot summer day the forest is always cool. The dense canopy sucks up almost all the sunshine, both light and heat. Some places a slim ray of light comes through, but mostly the forest bottom is filled with shadow. It is a beautiful place to be on such a day, at least when the mosquitoes are not out in force ...

The tourists are happy, of course. Almost naked, they soak up the cancer-inducing ultraviolet rays that are much more common here near the pole. Oh well. Melanoma usually takes 20 years or so to develop, and perhaps there will be a cure before then. Of course, that was what we thought 20 years ago, too. The ozone layer is thinner now. Excuse me if I don't lie around virtually naked on the beach. (Quite apart from the fact that a virtually naked me is a scary sight, covered alternately in fur, warts and rashes.)

Because of the heat I have been drinking a lot, and eating that much less. (Unless you count yogurt and milk as food.) I don't seem to get any slimmer over three days, though. And I seriously hope this won't last for months and months. I wasn't built to live in the tropics. It may be that we all originated in Africa, but my ancestors must have been among the first to leave. They have my sympathy.