Summer in the South Is Becoming Unbearable

A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma. The smoke felt much like these past years of extreme weather in the South have—heavy, muddling, inescapable.

This week, more wildfire smoke Charlottesville and much of the South. Meanwhile, communities wilted under a heat wave, rattled from thunder, and flooded with rain. Towns in central Arkansas by severe thunderstorms last weekend were facing and worse-than-normal air quality by the end of this week. Last Monday, I watched hail batter my car. Within an hour, the sun was back out and I was picking peaches in my friends’ garden, pulling off my sweatshirt because the heat had become so fierce.