I don’t know what it’s like to live along that imaginary equatorial line, where the length of days and the warmth of the sun doesn’t change with any calendar. But a few score miles off the line, seasons of dry and wet seem to be normal; and further away, in what we call “temperate” zones north and south, the length of sunlight each day grows and wains, and the earth’s rotations and distances from sun make for seasons. We count four: spring, summer, fall, winter.
Covid and climate change seem to be radically disturbing our calendars—and our seasons. Hot in spring and now it cools down—for a day or two. It looks like summer is coming back. Will we have a fall?
Fire season across the West has grown, until California counts no season at all. They are on the pyretic equator. Tornados, hurricanes, and torrential floods are blurring their traditional seasons in the Southeast. Droughts in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America are mixing with leadership failure and war and causing mass hunger and migration.
And even the Covid seems to be defying its expected seasons. We had been warned of a fall or winter spike; it’s happening now. Unless this isn’t yet the spike! Wallowa County, which almost completely escaped the first wave and a few since, now sees 6 and 10 new cases daily.
All of this has created great confusion in schools. It took decades to come to the “school year” shared by most American towns and cities. We were mostly agricultural, and the school year become gradually longer with fewer farmers, but we’ve held onto late spring to early fall—in our county irrigation to harvest—as summer vacation.
And sports have become attached to seasons: summer to baseball with better weather; basketball to indoor winter; and football to the fall. A little rain, mud, or snow didn’t stop a football game. Seemed—until artificial turf and indoor stadiums, to define the sport.
After all these years, football is my favorite season, though I watch little of it on TV, and can’t tell you who won the last super bowl—in basketball season! I can remember the coastal dew and smell of the grass at Oceanside High School in 1950s California, the warm and slanted light Saturday afternoons at UC Riverside in the early sixties. I don’t have much memory of specific games or of personal achievements, but remember teammates, 3-a-day practices, bus rides, and the band playing on Friday nights. I think I could still sing the alma mater.
In all, I only played six or seven years of football, deciding as a senior in college that rugby was a better sport. But watching son Matt and Joseph High play and lose to arch-rival Enterprise on a snow-covered field in Joseph, and him leave it all on the field in a near win against the same team the next year; and watching grandson Trey’s crushing tackles and an impossible fingertip touchdown catch in a state 6-man championship game which he and his proud teammates won, ginned up my own old dreams of fall.
But Covid gave us football in March and basketball in April this last school year, with track squeezed in on the ends. And now Covid is peaking out of its season, and what with Covid masks and smoke blowing in from California’s extended fire season, there might not be a high school football season this fall.
“Season” seems to be losing its meanings.
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