I’ve spent the past two months in a kind of hibernation. I go out during the hazy breath of dawn, or during the hour or two before the sun sinks into the horizon, when everything is bathed in gold, shadows elongated. I learned this tactic last year while spending six months writing a screenplay in Ojai. The summers there are like walking into a wall of fire from 9am until sunset, something I’d never experienced before living in the milder climates of Los Angeles and San Diego, where I currently live. When July came around this year, the heat caused my long COVID symptoms to worsen, and I felt like I’d regressed six months in my recovery, hardly able to chop vegetables or do household chores. Plus, the coast was crowded with tourists and “summer people”, something I try to avoid at all costs.
But come September—even if it is still hotter than an ogre’s asshole—there is a reprieve. The sun sets at a more reasonable hour, most of the tourists go home, and screaming children go back to school. This is when my summer begins. For some reason, the term “locals summer” brings to mind Dogtown and Z Boys, the films Blue Crush and Point Break, and the summers I’d spend in my late teens and early twenties surfing twice a day, eating whatever I wanted, and having sex with my boyfriend in a dingy apartment we shared on the coast, my hair still damp and briny from the sea. My favorite cafés are quieter, and the sun pulls a little farther away from the earth, invoking a fluttery light resplendent with the promise of autumn.
Locals summer means catching up with my friends who have spent the season carting their kids around in attempt to save them from boredom, having a social life again, finding parking and swimming in the Pacific in the flaxen late-afternoon light, wearing linen shorts with cardigans, and bicycle rides at the lake as the leaves slowly change from green to yellow to crimson. It means coming alive again after a season of rest.
The summer might be coming to an end, but it feels like everything is beginning.
"hotter than an ogre's asshole" wow. I kind of like that.