Summer began 84 million years ago, when the earth’s axis tilted twelve degrees. Before that, there were no seasons.
We don’t know how dinosaurs – then the reigning species on earth – responded to the sudden existence of summer, but I could imagine the triceratops being pleased.
The Age of Reptiles gave way to the Mammalian Era. Birds and small mammals tend to be busier in the summer, gathering food for themselves and their children, storing up supplies for grueling winter.
Six million years ago, early humans appeared. Allow me to offer a Marxist theory of summer. Karl Marx suggested that the economic system affects every aspect of society.
Our earliest forebears were hunter-gatherers. For them summer was fun: a profusion of herbs, grasses, flowers, seeds, insects, fungi to feast upon. Their diet was much more varied than ours.
Roughly 11,000 years ago, agriculture was invented, and summer became a time for hard work. Forty-two percent of humans (if the Internet can be believed) are still agricultural workers
In postindustrial economies, summer again becomes entertaining: tourism is a major industry, and Americans bizarrely fly to sweltering Disney World in the middle of summer. (I did this twice, and I would recommend sitting in a closet as a more satisfying vacation option.)
Remember, summer only happens on half the globe at a time. Just as “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” (to quote Paul Simon) one woman’s summer is another woman’s winter. North America’s heat wave is South America’s chill wind. While we’re playing badminton at Kenneth L. Wilson campground, they’re breaking out wool scarves in Barinas, Venezuela.
Haiku, the great Japanese poetic form, always includes a reference to the season. Here are three poems by Issa (1763-1828), my favorite haikuist:
sitting on the head
of a sleeping cow:
a frog
evening moon –
pond snails singing
in the kettle
drinking tea alone;
every day the butterfly
stops by
These are translations by David G. Lanoue, from his excellent website haikuguy.com.
So much has been written about summer, it’s hard to know where to begin. The book I’m reading at the moment, Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse, tells the story of Hans Giebenrath, a German adolescent in a village in the Black Forest. Here’s a description of Hans’ first summer after high school:
“Between the bold-straight trunks there hovered a mugginess characteristic of forests in the morning, a mixture compounded of the sun’s warmth, mist, the smell of moss and resin, fir needles and mushrooms which caresses all one’s senses like a gentle anesthetic. Hans flung himself on the moss, picked the generous bilberry bushes clean, heard here and there a woodpecker hammer against a tree trunk and the call of the envious cuckoo.”
We associate summer with swimming, but throughout most of history the majority of people could not propel themselves through water (though swimmers are depicted in cave paintings in Wadi Sura, Egypt that are roughly 7000 years old). In the 19th century, people spoke of “going bathing” rather than “swimming,” because they would put on humorous Victorian outfits and stand in the water, or submerge themselves a bit, but not actually swim. The Boy Scouts – founded in 1908 – required swimming skills, and helped popularize the aquatic arts.
I remember summers – with the delightful tastes of cantaloupe, cherries and sweet corn – going back to 1958. At a drive-in movie theater on the outskirts of Kingston in 1966, I saw “The Endless Summer,” a documentary about surfers, I found it extremely dull. (That drive-in is now an evangelical church.)
That same year, The Happenings recorded “See You in September” – the original was by The Tempos in 1959 – and my wife, by chance, sang that song to me today:
Have a good time, but remember,
there is danger in the summer moon above.
Will I see you in September,
or lose you to a summer love?
Every year has a “song of the summer.” What will it be this year? In 2024 it was certainly “Not like Us” by Kendrick Lamar. No one knows which tune will dominate this season, but one possibility is Jessie Murph’s “Blue Strips.”
My God, I forgot global warming! According to Scientific American, children in San Francisco today experience seven more heat waves per year than their counterparts in the mid-1960s. For at least 2300 people in 2023, in the US alone, summer was deadly.
Speaking of death, two musicians who recently passed away – Brian Wilson and Sly Stone – made significant contributions to summer-worship. Pretty much all the Beach Boys’ hits have a summery feel, but the only one I could find that actually mentions the season is the relatively obscure “All Summer Long” (1964). Sly Stone, on the other hand, composed the mumbly but ecstatic “Hot Fun in the Summertime:”
I cloud nine when I want to
Out of school, yeah
County fair in the country sun
And everything, it’s true
Ooh, yeah
Hot fun in the Summertime
Hot fun in the Summertime
Hot fun in the Summertime
Join the family! 
