It's Ray Bradbury Day today, July 4. That's not the official holiday, of course, and no one else knows about it but me. But this weekend of high summer and sultry nights and fireworks is what American fantasy writer Ray Bradbury evoked in many of his stories. No writer that I know has written so beautifully about summer, about light-effects and weather, and in general about nostalgic Americana. Therefore I honor him today.

His writing is out of fashion these days, too sweet for an age that exalts brutality. By today's standards, he is guilty of sentimentality and over-writing. Yet most of his stories hold up just fine when read in 2004, which was the far future when he was writing most of them. Only his use of the word "rocket" for "spacecraft" sounds dated. Some of his tales, which I have been re-reading lately, are truly prescient. I hope that many of those stories, about atomic war, are not at all prescient. Bradbury is still alive, and I also hope that he is at least getting some satisfaction over seeing wonderful machines like the Mars Rovers and Cassini exploring Mars and Saturn, even if people won't get there in his lifetime, and even if there are no dark, golden-eyed Native Martians looking into the rovers' cameras.

Ray Bradbury spent his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, north of Chicago, and when he was about 12, his family moved to Southern California. One of the major themes of his writing is exile from a lush, green, long-settled Midwestern environment to a harsh desert in which humans have to build pioneer towns up from the bare dirt, spreading tacky artificiality over the landscape. California, in his stories, became Mars. I wonder what he imagines now, looking over the pictures taken by "Spirit" and "Opportunity," which show Mars looking rather like Arizona without the cacti. Is that desolate landscape familiar to him?

The Chicago area, like much of the northern Midwest as well as my native New England, is a place where the seasons vary drastically. The temperatures can range from below zero in winter to above 90 degrees in summer. And there isn't much summer, really only about two months' worth. Summer, to a kid growing up in these places, is infinitely precious — not only is it warm, but you are out of school and (at least in earlier days) able to spend long afternoons fishing, or wandering, or just dreaming. Bradbury's childhood, immortalized in his book DANDELION WINE, perfects the memories:

…"I'm going to…keep track of things. For instance, you realize that every summer we do things over and over we did the whole darn summer before?"
"Like what, Doug?"
"Like making dandelion wine, like buying those new tennis shoes, like shooting off the first firecracker of the year, like making lemonade, like getting slivers in our feet, like picking wild fox grapes. Every year the same things, same way, no change, no difference. That's one half of summer, Tom."
"What's the other half?"
"Things we do for the first time ever."(page 19)

The most glorious thing in the summer is July fourth, and the fireworks displays. No one loves fireworks more than Ray Bradbury. No writer that I know can top his descriptions of this high ritual of summer. What's even better is that he put futuristic science fiction, weird fantasy, Mid-American nostalgia, and the Fourth of July all together. In my favorite Bradbury story of all, The Fire Balloons (from The Illustrated Man, 1951), decent but misguided priests travel to Mars hoping to convert the natives to Christianity. Here is how the story opens:

"Fire exploded over summer night lawns. You saw sparkling faces of uncles and aunts. Skyrockets fell up in the brown shining eyes of cousins on the porch, and the cold charred sticks thumped down in dry meadows far away.
The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine opened his eyes. What a dream: he and his cousins with their fiery play at his grandfather's ancient Ohio home so many years ago!
He lay listening to the great hollow of the church, the other cells where other Fathers lay. Had they, too, on the eve of the flight of the rocket Crucifix,lain with memories of the Fourth of July? Yes. This was like those breathless Independence dawns when you waited for the first concussion and rushed out on the dewy sidewalks, your hands full of loud miracles."(The Illustrated Man, page 75)

The priests encounter not unconverted natives but mysterious floating blue globes of light. The men are naturally frightened, but the dreaming Father Peregrine once again recalls fireworks, as well as his grandfather's "fire balloons" (which sound quite dangerous to modern eco-sensibilities):

"And again, Independence Night, thought Father Peregrine, tremoring. He felt like a child back in those July Fouth evenings, the sky blowing apart, breaking into powdery stars and burning sound, the concussions jingling house windows like the ice on a thousand thin ponds. The aunts, uncles, cousins, crying, "Ah!" as to some celestial physician. The summer sky colors. And the Fire Balloons, softly lighted, warmly billowed bits of tissue, like insect wings, lying like folded wasps in boxes and, last of all, after the day of riot and fury, at long last from their boxes, delicately unfolded, blue, red, white, patriotic — The Fire Balloons! He saw the dim faces of dear relatives long dead and mantled with moss as Grandfather lit the tiny candle and let the warm air breathe up to form the balloon plumply luminous in his hands, a shining vision which they held, reluctant to let it go; for, once released, it was yet another year gone from life, another Fourth, another bit of Beauty vanished. And then up, up, still up through the warm summer night constellations, the Fire Balloons had drifted, while red-white-and-blue eyes followed them, wordless, from family porches. Away into deep Illinois country, over night rivers and sleeping mansions the Fire Balloons dwindled, forever gone…."(page 80)

The glowing Martian spheres turn out to be disembodied, almost angelic beings, who have no need of religion or redemption, but who renew the priests' own faith. This is Bradbury at his finest.

But there is always that sense of impermanency, the knowledge that the idyllic warmth of Summer is fleeting, especially in a climate where there are ten months of winter. Bradbury was haunted by that, as I am. Even though I now live in a somewhat milder climate, summer will be over before I can turn around. Bradbury writes about this in one of his most famous stories, A Scent of Sarsaparilla, published in his 1959 collection A Medicine for Melancholy. In this story, a man discovers a time-warp in his attic, though Cora, his mean-spirited wife, hates the idea:

"Cora," he said,…"you know what attics are? They're Time Machines, in which old, dim-witted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavor of linen and snow at the same time."
Cora fidgeted.
(…)"Well, wouldn't it be interesting," he asked…,if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?"
"It's not always summer back in the old days," she said. "It's just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn't always summer."
"Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was."
"Wasn't."
"What I mean is this," he said…"If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life."
"Unicycle?"
"You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance."
"Blah," she said, "blah, blah." And added, "blah!"

Happy Ray Bradbury Day, and happy July. Taste and enjoy, for summer will be gone before you know it.

(What, no math? Don't worry, I'll be back with more math and science in a bit.)

Posted at 4:26 am | link