My friend who grew up in Mendocino took us on a river float last summer. “It’s easy,” she said, “It’s like three hours. You just sit in the floats and get carried down the river till the end.” We left one car at the top and one at the bottom, to ferry us back when we arrived.
It was sweltering, 95 degrees and the electric pump was broken. We stood, near-collapsing, blowing up the floats by mouth— taking turns, drinking water, almost naked, heavily sunscreened— in the road near the top of the river.
The float took us seven hours. The river water was low. We had to swim or carry our floaties a lot of the way. It was so hot. We were baking. M’s car was the one at the bottom of the river, so she had the keys in a waterproof container with her.
“Right?” my hosting friend checked a few hours into the float.
Wrong.
She had left them in the car at the top. We would have to beg drunk strangers at the bottom of the river for a ride up. The stress rose significantly.
About an hour in, before any of this became clear, I took a spoonful of mushroom jam. A tiny spoonful. Just a taste.
Dear reader, I became higher than I have possibly ever been. I was transcending space and time.
All this set up is to say: there was a moment, floating down the river, unaware of the plans collapsing around me, my friends’ fatigue, the extended float and fear greeting us at the end, that I blissfully stared into the sun and thought a sentence that would be hellish to everyone around me, but was beautiful to me.
I thought pleasantly, “This day never has to end.”
I was swarmed with sunlight and leaves and water, with the feeling that I would have enough time once we drove the 2.5 hours back to Oakland to spend the afternoon with my lover sitting on my bed, then eat a beautiful dinner, then on and on into infinity. I felt, as time dilated, that this day of summer could last infinitely. It would never get dark, I would never get tired, and summer would finally, completely, win.
I grew up in a condo on Mohawk in Lincoln Park, and we would eat dinner on the porch. In summertime, I almost wrote, but it’s summertime now and pretty much impossible to imagine or remember any other season.
So yeah, we’d eat on the porch, which overlooked a wide alley. Sometimes, a young couple, not always the same one, about my parents’ age, would yell up as they walked by upon spotting us.
“Ron! Jane! Girls!” And we’d peer over the edge of the wooden deck, with neighbors’ decks below us, and zigzagging stairs connecting them. My mom’s face would absolutely split into a grin. She is so beautiful— freckles, straight teeth, enormous spirit.
My mom never, in a family of three children, in my entire memory of growing up, said no to a sleepover. So, the outcome was foretold.
“Come on up!” She’d say, every time. And then we’d have more voices at dinner, more plates, “I hope there’s enough,” she’d say, but there was always enough. My mom always makes more than enough food.
I guess I’m testing a theory: summer, sunlight, heat make boundaries expand, like a sponge filling up with water. It creates the possibility for someone happening upon a deck dinner and joining. Summer makes my front door expand. It gets stickier and I have to muscle it open and slam it shut. But the door to my porch stays open. Anyone walking by in the alley could yell up and join if I’m around. I could go in and out, bring people through and into the world all day and my front door would never have to know.
I had a gay date this week where the person made a beautiful salad of beets and carrots and rhubarb on a goat cheese and yogurt base and we ate in their wild Humboldt backyard. They shouted over the fence to greet their next door neighbor coming home. The next day I got a picture of almost exactly the same salad from another friend on another gay date. Overlaps, folds, nonsense.
Summer makes days into endless sunlight, at a certain point in the afternoon you can’t tell what time it is at all. It could be 10am, it could be 6pm, and please, I don’t want to know!
It loosens concepts of time, ownership, obligation, creating a world where it’s hard to think at all in the heat, and all you want is to dip into water and eat and dip again and tangle up with sweating bodies in front of the AC and moan about how hot you are. It’s a world of overlaps, where the person you know just saw your other friend yesterday and they talked about you. It’s queer— polarities just can’t survive this type of melt.
I don’t know how to close this, because my brain is wide and the threads aren’t connecting and maybe that’s obvious to anyone reading this. I haven’t done this seasonal rotation— stiff cold to muscular heat— in 5 years. I’ve got to get used to it again.
I turned 34 this past Sunday, sweating and surrendering because there really is no other choice. Summer dommes, control is an illusion now. I should probably go dip in the lake, and you know what, I probably will.
