Weather or not

In June, when I was having my teeth cleaned, my dental hygienist told me that, over the summer, she was going on a family vacation to Greece. Her daughters are growing up. One graduated from college a couple of years ago, the other is in a junior. And E was really looking forward to what might be the last family vacay of this sort. I've known E since she was pregnant with her first child, and have "watched" the girls grow up from afar and via twice a year updates. So I was very excited for the family and this major trip. E's husband is a police officer, so the family is not super wealthy, and the trip to Greece was, I suspect, a pretty big deal. 

All summer, whenever I saw the news on the crazy wildfires in Greece, I thought of E. I watched as vacationers and locals fled for their lives, some of them running into the ocean with whatever they had on their backs, hoping that there'd be a boat to save them, hoping that I wouldn't recognize E among the frantic crowds on the beach, or flopped on an airline terminal floor waiting for a flight out. 

I've only been to Greece once, and that was years ago, but I remember it as a magical place. Those Greek islands: so beautiful, with the whitewashed houses, the turquoise sea, the smell of eucalyptus. 

The Parthenon, which I walked up and around, and also viewed from a hill, watching a corny yet brilliant "sound and light show." Just spectacular. 

In Athens, there seemed to be a rizogalo (rice pudding) vendor on every corner. Glorious! 

And I have fond memories of the peasant shirt I bought at an open air market there. (A couple of months ago, I found a vaguely similar shirt at Nordstrom Rack, which probably cost 10 or 20 times what I paid for that piece in 1973.)

My friends and I camped for a couple of weeks on a small island off the beaten path. We slept in the front yard of a guy - Andreas - who had a modest house on the beach. For our plein-air toilet, we took care of business by sitting on the stone wall that bordered the donkey pasture next to Andreas' house. Sometimes, the donkey moseyed over to see what we were up to.

There was no store in the village we stayed in, but we could walk into the fields and, for about a quarter, would come away with a bag of peppers, tomatoes, and cukes - and a watermelon. Actually, two watermelons, as the fellow working the field would use his hand to karate chop a watermelon open to show us that it was ripe, and then hand up that watermelon and another one.

There was a taverna near where we were staying, and we'd go there for a beer and to buy a loaf of bread every other day. We bought fish off one of the boats that harbored near the taverna. Talk about day boat fish!

We were there in the summer, and the weather was fabulous. (It was June or July.) Sunny and cloudless. Warm during the day. Cool enough to sleep comfortably at night. 

The only sour note - which we saw in Athens, but not on our obscure island - was the fact that Greece was ruled by a military junta, and there signs similar to this posted all over the place. 

It's the flames I remember the most about those signs. (I believe the 1973 edition had more lurid orange flames.) And, after wondering whether E and her family were okay, it's what came to mind as I watched parts of Greek burning.

The weather may have been perfect when I was in Greece fifty years ago, but there've been awful fires in Greece for the last few years.

And there's been terrible heat in all parts of Europe, which is particularly awful because so few people/buildings have air conditioning. (Of course, the fact that most Americans have AC is good for our comfort, but not so great for the environment.)

We're none of us exempt from the horrors of climate change, and it's starting to wreak some havoc on tourist sites like the Greek islands where I spent time half a century ago, and where E and her family vacationed this summer.

These shifting — and worsening — weather patterns are also shifting tourists’ vacation habits, with more people looking for new summer escapes as they find old vacation haunts increasingly uncomfortable and northern locations more welcoming, travel industry experts say.

“We started to see a really large increase in demand for destinations like Norway and Denmark, which wouldn’t normally be destinations for summer,” said Rebecca Marsi, founder of the London-based private travel club Little Emperors. “People don’t want to travel with a young baby to a destination that’s 48 degrees [118 degrees Fahrenheit]. It’s just not pleasant.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Correction, Rebecca Marsi: ain't no one - with or without a baby - that wants to head to a destination where it's 118 in the shade. 

Travelers aren't abandoning Greece and other more southerly European climes entirely. They're shifting their trips there to September and October, and heading to the Scandinavian or Baltic countries during the summer months.

Overall, one study found the "62 percent of travelers... admitted that recent climate events have influenced their trip planning."

The US is not, of course, exempt. Lahaina on Maui is destroyed. Recent fires in the Lake Tahoe area sent tourists and locals fleeing.”

Climate change is also impacting the areas where winter tourism has been a big deal.

Ski resorts don't have as much snow as they used to, and while resorts can somewhat overcome this with snow-making machines, I don't imagine there are many folks in Switzerland or Vermont who'll be opening new ski resorts any time soon. Some are positioning themselves more as summer resorts, where people can escape the heat by doing a bit of mountain climbing. Which is, of course, what New England mountain resorts were before people had AC, and before the skiing industry really took off in the 1950's and 1960's 

Our area [New England] has been experiencing shorter winters, particularly since the 1980s. A study published in 2021 by researchers at Salem State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that winter is warming faster than any other season in New England. January 2023 saw record warmth in much of the region, hitting ski areas in southern New England hard.

Tourists will no doubt adjust to new climate realities. Vacationers are going to vacation; travelers are going to travel.

But tourism disruptions aside, Gail Carlson, a professor of environmental studies at Colby hopes that this summer's weather is a wake up call.

“You could see it in the orange skies or chokingly high air pollution from the Canadian wildfires,” said Carlson, who also authored “Human Health and the Climate Crisis.” “When I put my toes in the ocean in Maine, they didn’t immediately curl up in shock from the water temperature. It was warmer.”

She hopes the silver lining of this summer’s very visible and highly publicized extreme weather is that it prompts action, or at least awareness, among those who never thought seriously about climate change.

“Many times, people don’t take action unless it’s something that affects them directly,” she said. “This summer, a lot of people were affected. Let’s hope something good and positive changes will come from that.”

I'm with Gail Carlson. Sure, given that the most heart-stopping water I've ever stepped toe in was in Maine, it's kind of too bad that the warming of Maine waters is so dire. But we really do have to wake up. All the way up.