St. Remedius Radio Special: “The Rains In Dallas Fall Mainly Elsewhere”

The End of August and the Stress of Texas Summer

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

In most places in the Northern Hemisphere, the end of August marks the beginning of the end of summer. Temperatures fall, the jackets and warmer blankets come out, and thoughts turn to soups, baked goods, and casseroles. The air abounds with cinnamon and dying leaf, and no wincing when touching metal or getting into a car left outside in the sun. No screaming when walking outside barefoot, at least from heat. Everyone looks to the horizon fearing the inevitable return of winter, but not yet. Now is the time to relax outdoors for a bit, preferably around a firepit while looking up at the night skies, before the snow and ice drive everyone inside.

“Most places in the Northern Hemisphere” do not include Dallas, Texas.

The end of August in Dallas is a dictionary definition of “the cruelty is the point.” If the city hits yearly record high temperatures, it’s usually in the last two weeks of the eighth month of the Gregorian Calendar. The ground dries and hardens, forming massive cracks in the clay underlying the city that threaten and sometime succeeds in breaking ankles and swallowing puppies. Roads and yards alike absorb the heat all day and slowly release it after dark, meaning that temperatures at dawn are only slightly less oppressive than at mid-afternoon. The local fauna and flora, having spent hundreds of thousands of years dealing with a climate more akin to the fynbos of South Africa than the rest of North America, have either burned up and shriveled up, gone dormant, or go through the last of their reserves. The sentients of Dallas aren’t that resourceful or that smart, so children still start school during the worst of the heat, adults increasingly suffer from head colds and bronchitis instigated by moving in between overly hot parking lots and overly air conditioned offices, and everyone else blocks windows and doors and dreams of storms.

Both contemporaries of St. Remedius Medical College and those who came to Dallas after its disappearance asks the same question about August weather: “You have enough people capable of changing the weather here, so why not change it?” It’s a valid question, and one that uncertified witches and psychers try to rectify each year, to their detriment. Every few years, a gaggle of Outstanding Witches attempt to break the heat and drought by summoning rainstorms, against all advice from certified and licensed aeromancers. In other years, St. Remedius salvage enthusiasts attempt an end run around the Second Law of Thermodynamics by trying to vent the ambient heat elsewhere, usually into a previously unmapped quantum pocket but sometimes to astronomical bodies with a surfeit of cold. (During the great Heat Wave of 1980, a few tinkers attempted precisely that and actually succeeded. The explosion on Pluto simultaneously temporarily made the dwarf planet visible to the naked human eye for a week and buried the tinkers and the rest of the town of Argyle under about five kilometers of nitrogen ice precipitated out of the atmosphere. Multiple authorities watch to make sure that this doesn’t happen again: nobody cares about Argyle, but Pluto is a precious resource.)

The reasons for such spectacular failures to regulate the weather in Dallas are many: multiple weather systems and fronts that converge on the general Dallas/Fort Worth area, an excess of metal and concrete in areas most likely to absorb heat all summer, quantum pockets that open and close based on the ambient temperature, and deep and ancient magics that still evade analysis, much less neutralization. Anyone wishing drastic change usually collapses the general universal field keeping the local atmosphere stable, setting off thunderstorms, hailstorms, rains of blood and/or urine, and so-called reflective mirages. Experienced aeromancers avoid Dallas in August for precisely that reason, as even minor spells can lead to doom, and both past and future technologies prove either inadequate to make significant changes or cause a probability crash and set off worse fractures of space-time. Try to make the back yard cool enough for a cookout, get eurypterids and mesonychids finishing off the hot dogs and looking speculatively at the guests.

Sadly, the best way to instigate a change in Dallas weather is to keep doing what works best. Prayer. Going to a carwash or replacing a roof. Planning a Labor Day holiday outside of the state. Most of all, grumbling about the heat. At least the humidity stays between “lung-dessicating” and “sucking moisture out of every available surface and material, including metal and rock,” so most Dallasites have little reason to complain about the humidity. No, that’s for September.

(And a very happy 60th birthday to Shirley Manson: had I been three hours more premature, she and I would be the same exact age.)

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

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