I love changes of the season. No, I don’t mean when football season turns to baseball season, or even when duck season turns to wabbit season! Rather I’ve always appreciated the blooming of flowers in the Spring, the explosion of color that accompanies Autumn, and the crisp bite in the air that tells us Winter has arrived—apologies to Jon Snow. The extremely perceptive among you will undoubtedly notice I’ve left out Summer, that joyous time of year when school is out, shorts are in, and a sense of ‘anything goes’ prevails. Well . . . frankly . . . I’m not really a big fan.
Those who know me well are aware I attended graduate school at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. People who find that out for the first time often express envy at my having lived so long in paradise, but my usual response is pretty deflating. I didn’t enjoy it. At all. And it’s not just me, my wife didn’t really care for it either. And while there are many reasons why that location and lifestyle just aren’t for us, one of the biggest has to do with the climate . . . it’s Summer all year long.
Now, for those of you who, upon reading that last bit, sighed inwardly and dreamt of escape from long Winters in Wisconsin or Montana, I’ll admit Hawaii seemed nice for about the first three months. But truthfully, as soon as we passed the first seasonal boundary and absolutely nothing changed, the islands began to lose their luster for me. The Summer just droned on . . . and on and on and on. There was no end to it!
Opening the doors to the lanai on December 25th and getting punched in the face by a humidity that never goes away and makes green fuzz grow on everything in the house was the last straw for me. I don’t generally enjoy the Summer anywhere, but I can usually endure it knowing my favorite season of all is just around the corner. In Hawaii, there is no corner, and I found this downright depressing. Autumn was just never going to come.
As for my general distaste of summer, it has mostly to do with the heat. In the Winter, I can always put on more clothing if I feel a chill. In fact, there’s no realistic limit to the amount of personal insulation I can strap to my body in order to stay warm. In the Summer . . . well . . . let’s just say you can only take off so much before you’re arrested. But, you say, I can always go inside, where the air is conditioned and cool. True, but I’d offer in response that air conditioning of the sort we’re used to is a relatively recent invention, and the jury is still out as to whether or not it really helps us or just makes the outside seem all that much hotter when we do emerge from our human-sized mini-fridges.
In ancient times, humanity created cooler air by one of three main methods. You either built shade within which to escape the relentless heat of the sun, dug rooms and chambers down into the cool earth, or ran water through an area and let the evaporation cool gardens, courtyards, and in some cases even rooms. While we instinctively understand the first two methods, the local cooling effect produced by the evaporation of moving water was something I didn’t truly understand till I felt it in a small park in Japan one day. I dawdled for nearly half-an-hour in that miniature paradise and ended up being late to work that morning. Unbelievable the cooling effect that artificial, shallow stream generated in an open, concrete square!
Aside from matters of temperature we generally take the changing seasons for granted. I think this is a reflection of how separated we’ve become from the food production activities that took up most people’s time as far back as humans have gathered into communities. Not so very long ago procuring food to feed one’s family generally meant growing and preparing it yourself. To do this, a community needed to be acutely aware of the changing of the season since each individual crop had an optimal planting and harvesting period determined through generations of trial and very hungry error. Farmers—and if you go back just three hundred years, that profession was practiced by the vast majority of human population worldwide—prepared their lands, put seed (carefully safeguarded from the previous year’s harvest) into the ground, then watered, weeded, harvested, and at times defended their crops.
This all required an awareness of the time of year that is simply lost on us now. What do I care, living in downtown Tokyo, what time of year it is? Can’t I just walk 300 meters to the nearest grocery store and buy strawberries any time of the year? Sure, the price may go up when they’re “out of season” but I can still get them because people have figured out how to grow them in greenhouses all year long. Not so long ago, once strawberry season was over, you ate no strawberries again until next year. Perish the thought!! So for us then, modern people living in a noisy, mechanized world, the changing of the season becomes nothing more than a benchmark for temperature and fashion.
Still, there are parts of the world—Afghanistan instantly comes to mind for me—where the changing of the season continues to have a very real impact on how life is lived. The brutal winters of the Hindu Kush Mountains have kept alive a very old concept that seems terribly anachronistic to us today, accustomed as we are to fighting wars year around in every imaginable climate. In Eastern Afghanistan the concept of the “Fighting Season” remains alive and well. Not so much for the western armies assisting the pseudo-democratic government, perhaps, but for the guerrillas, militias, criminals, and rebels living and fighting in the shadowy crevices between craggy peaks, the Winter is just not suitable for military operations.
In ancient and medieval times, the fighting season lay between the planting of crops and the harvest. Civilizations couldn’t afford to lose the manpower required for either of these labor-intensive food-producing activities and so campaigns were planned and battles generally fought during the Summer months. This concept went out of fashion, to a degree, with the widespread development of professional armies manned by full-time soldiers, and the virtual explosion in worldwide mercenary populations. In other words, troops who would never be required to return home for the harvest and so could stay in the field longer and campaign as far away as could be logistically supported.
The Assyrians were making good use of professional soldiers as early as 727 B.C. and set the example for the Persians, Chinese, Macedonians, and Romans who eventually followed suit. That not every nation in the world afterward built standing armies is interesting, and makes clear that the establishment of a professional, full-time force wasn’t all upside. In fact, it intentionally created yet another segment of the population that consumed food without contributing to the production effort. This is a problem that persists into the modern era and each year following their Winter exercise cycle the North Korean Army breaks down to assist farming collectives with the planting of crops in the Spring. Why? Because North Korea has created an army too large for the rest of its population to feed. This is, by way of example, what the simple changing of a season can mean.
So, while you’re digging out the jean shorts, straw hats, and contraband lawn darts in anticipation of another wild summer of grilling, beach parties, and trips to the lake, I’d ask you to take a moment to think about what the changing of the season might mean to others with whom we share this earth. It’s a good bet a lot of them are far more affected by seasonal change than are we. For some it’s time to get seed into the ground and pray for a good harvest several months hence. For others, it’s time to ensure the family’s arsenal is cleaned and ready to defend loved ones, land, and dignity. Regardless, the transition from one season to the next has the potential to bring significant change . . . except for those living in Hawaii . . . for them it’s just another day at the beach.
M. G. Haynes