A Serious Case of Summer Blues

Any day, any minute now, summer is going to arrive. Isn’t it? After all, the signposts and seasonal cues are there, those reassuring little rituals that measure out our lives with metronomic precision.

Memorial Day and the Fourth of July have already come and gone, trailing phosphorescent clouds of nostalgia and patriotism. Wimbledon and the summer solstice are but fond memories.

A few days ago, Major League Baseball’s All-Stars put off their impending strike long enough to distract us with their annual slug-fest. Closer to home, the L.A. Philharmonic has donned its white evening wear and hunkered down at the Hollywood Bowl until Labor Day. Meanwhile, a giddy Hollywood basks in the moonglow of record box-office hauls.

School’s out. The beaches are open. And after a lengthy bout of what sunny-minded Angelenos darkly refer to as “June gloom,” temperatures this week shot up into the 90s.

Why, then, does it somehow not feel like summer? Maybe because this summer has been plagued by so many false starts, deferred expectations, odd flashes of lightning. Yep, it’s summertime, and the livin’ is uneasy.

This summer’s flair for the bizarre and troubling was symbolized by Tuesday’s All-Star game. Faced with a 7-7 tie in the 11th inning of a contest that already had run 3 1/2 hours, Major League Commissioner Bud Selig declared the game over and sent the players to the showers--without an MVP named--while fans cursed and pelted the field with garbage.

The official excuse was that both teams had run out of pitchers. But it was a Twilight Zone coda to a baseball season already tainted with strike threats and an alleged steroid craze. What’s next for America’s beloved summer pastime? Banning Cracker Jack in the bleachers? Canceling the seventh-inning stretch?

Across the West, the season of iced tea and surfer tunes opened to the roar of some of the worst forest fires in U.S. history, laying waste to huge stretches of wilderness and threatening to engulf entire communities. Incredibly, of the two alleged suspects in the Colorado and Arizona blazes, one is a U.S. Forest Service employee, the other a firefighter. A friend, just back from the Great American Summer Family Vacation, was asked how he’d found those amber fields of grain and purple mountains’ majesty. “Covered in smoke, mostly,” he e-mailed back.

Not all this summer’s disasters are natural ones. Wasn’t this supposed to be the season the American economy threw off its lingering 9/11 jitters and high-tech blues, so we could all get back to making money hand over fist? Instead we’ve watched one Fortune 500 company after another go down in flames, victims of their own executives’ finagling, or of creative accounting practices, or some combination thereof. As the stock market continues to tank, President Bush, after pledging to crack down on white-collar scofflaws, has been put on the defensive about his own tardiness in disclosing a 1990 stock sale.

Not even national holidays have been exempt from this summer’s nasty tricks. On the Fourth of July, local newscasters were obliged to open their coverage not with footage of kids gobbling watermelon and beer-gutted men shagging fly balls in Griffith Park, but with news of the shooting death of two people by a gunman at LAX. In San Dimas, the crash of a Cessna in a crowded park cut short the lives of four people. And last week, the alleged beating of an African American man in Inglewood by a police officer, caught on videotape, has raised the specter of other beatings and of long, hot L.A. summers past.

If parts of this summer have been ominous and unsettling, others have been just plain strange. An ebullient South Korean soccer team made the World Cup semifinals while Argentina, Italy and France were sent packing. Weird.... An iconic ‘60s rock band hints that it may be putting out new music for the first time in 20 years. Then its bass player drops dead of a heart attack on the eve of a U.S. tour. Weird....

Martha Stewart, America’s first lady of domestic bliss, finds herself transformed into a shifty-eyed harpy staring down from the tabloid covers, following her alleged stock-trading improprieties. You have to wonder what Ann Landers would have to say about all this. (Knowing Ann, probably plenty.)

Even the recent death of Hall of Famer Ted Williams wasn’t allowed to be the dignified, uplifting story of a great American life that it should’ve been. A world-class athlete and U.S. military pilot in two wars, “politically conservative but in his core the most democratic of men” (as David Halberstam wrote in the New York Times), Williams was an exemplar of a John Wayne-like brand of rugged individualism.

Now, in a grotesque twist, some of Williams’ kin have reportedly had the old man’s body shipped to an Arizona cryonics lab so his DNA can be frozen and someday used to clone another super-slugger. From sports immortal to Popsicle stick--what a way to go.

A few years back, in an essay in the New Yorker titled “The Myth of Summer,” Adam Gopnik wrote that a combination of killer traffic, changing social mores and the meager two weeks most Americans spend on summer vacation (compared with six for their European counterparts) had conspired to make the old-fashioned summer passe. Perhaps because of this, he speculated, Americans more than any other people cling to the fantasy of an endless summer filled with leisurely picnics, fat novels spread on beach blankets and people in tennis whites who look like the Kennedys.

“Since a good summer is ours by right,” Gopnik wryly observed, “we insist we’ve had one even if we haven’t, and make up in symbolism what we lack in spare time. Summer in America is another place, to be dreamed of rather than remembered.... Summer is about longing for summer.”

But something more than workaholism or gridlock in the Hamptons seems required to explain this summer’s melancholy. Our carefree demeanor looks a bit forced this year. Our rituals don’t feel as reassuring. That warm-weather incantation of “praise the Dodgers and pass the corn on the cob” doesn’t quite cut it. And is anyone seriously going to claim that “Men in Black II” belongs in the same class of escapist summer fantasy as “Jaws” or “Star Wars”?

Hanging over these reveries, of course, is the harrowing memory of 9/11, its anniversary rushing toward us. It brings to mind E.B. White’s beautiful essay “Once More to the Lake,” published in 1941, the same year Williams became the last major leaguer to hit .400.

Motivated by memories of his vanished childhood, White takes his son to the same Maine lake that he’d visited as a boy with his own father. While the narrator tries to convince himself that nothing has changed and all is right with the world, “a curious darkening of the sky” and an afternoon thunderstorm set up the essay’s unforgettable climax, when White’s son retrieves his wet trunks from the clothesline and prepares to go swimming with his friends:

“Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

There is an icy breeze blowing through America this summer that no East Coast heat wave or Arizona wildfire can dissipate, a dark cloud no bright Disney pastels can paint over. That, in itself, is not necessarily surprising or bad. As it does in White’s essay, the shock may only hit us hard if we ignore the rumbles on the horizon, tune out the warnings, pretend this is a summer like any other. It isn’t.

What the country could use in the meantime is a good vacation. Unless we’ve been on one for too long already.