America's exceptional weather - 6 August 1993

A very strange, a possibly a unique photograph appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle last Monday morning, it was an aerial shot of the Pacific coastline at San Francisco, a long stretch of beach.

On the beach were hundreds of people in bathing suits, bikinis, it was a picture of just one of the several beaches that are enclosed by separate headlands around the long thumb of the San Francisco Peninsular that sticks up between the ocean and the bay. This beach is called Ocean Beach and the rare, the remarkable thing about the picture was that of those many hundreds playing or lounging on the sands there were I counted them actually seven young people in the water up to their knees, say.

Things have to get very desperate in San Francisco to have people take their lives in their hands and wade into the Pacific Ocean, things were desperate last Saturday and Sunday the high temperature in San Francisco itself was 98 and 99º Fahrenheit, not only a record for the date, which is what American newspapers always mean when they say a record, but a record for any date ever. And to San Franciscans, incomprehensible as a temperature in July or August. You know Mark Twain's line, the coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco. It must be one of the few cities on earth where families that can afford a summer cottage have it inland away from the sea coast for July and August are the months when the great white fog comes sliding in from the Pacific and the nights are damp and chilly indeed.

This is something the chamber of commerce naturally doesn't go on about, it explains the regular sight of tourists standing of the top of Nob Hill where there are three big hotels facing a public park and a splendid view down to the old town and the bay and beyond the Berkeley Hills and you can count – except last weekend – you can count on these couples and trios shivering in T-shirts and saying to themselves, "I thought we were in California". Then the chamber of commerce hopes they will shuttle off down town and buy some sweaters. But the the usual, the absolutely dependable prevailing west wind coming in from the Pacific was blocked out well beyond the Golden Gate by the rarity of the Santa Ana, an east wind blowing steadily from the California desert and that of course is as hot a wind as you can have. It still doesn't heat up the waters lapping the coast to make swimming in them a bearable thing to do. There is an occasional young madman who tries it, but even in the bay, the waters are so icy whatever the atmosphere that a guard I once met told me he jumped in one hot afternoon to rescue a mother and child who'd slipped off a rock. It took him five minutes to fish them out; he was confined to a hospital for two days with chill and shock.

And during the last 20 years that the island of Alcatraz was a federal prison, 19 men tried to escape, five never got beyond range of the catwalk guns and were shot to death, 12 others were either taken early in the water or felt the ice around their spleen and sloshed back to the comfort of a lifetime's imprisonment, two vanished presumed dead.

The cold Pacific is San Francisco's year round air conditioner, so to the natives as well as the tourists last weekend was an unprecedented freak. You may wonder about the wives and children cosily off in their summer cottages. I imagine they beat it back to the city because once you went inland in any direction north across the bridge into Marin, east across the bay the temperatures were up to anything between 105 and 110.

In case you're beginning to bleed with sympathy for poor us tramping along the streets of San Francisco, I'll say one thing. Since the only way you can have a hot day in San Francisco is from the East from the desert wind, the feel of the breeze itself is bone dry. The humidity at the peak of the day was under 20% and I found that if you stayed on the shady side of the street you could stay comfortable. After a mile's walk your fingers were as dry as dust. Whereas, I came back to New York a day or two ago and 94º was accompanied by 70% humidity dripping, nasty. An old television director of mine once warned me before we took off for some unfamiliar location that you won't get the weather they promised and they'll all tell you they've never seen anything like it.

Well this summer, the meteorologists are as puzzled as the rest of us at the stubbornness of two or three massive, different weather systems that took their stand in unusual places and refused to budge. The immense and appalling floods along the course of the Missouri and the Mississippi, many thousands of square miles will be useless for farming and many for decent living long after the waters have receded and the huge landscape of mud has been worked over. The cost to the federal government, incidentally, went up this week; they now figure not 9 but $11 billion. And while the Midwestern heartland and the Mississippi Valley were drowning about 5/600 miles to the south-east, the state of Georgia showed stretches of farmland all away to the horizon looking like a crocodiles back, no rain – no rain for months on end. The result, 40% of Georgia's crops – cotton, corn, peanuts, soya bean – are rotted and gone. That too will require compensation from the federal government. I don't know about Wyoming, before I flew out to San Francisco I stopped off in the spectacular range of the Rockies shamelessly christened by the French Les Grand Tetons, which we discreetly translate as The Grand Titans.

Where I was, the big booming business is tourism, skiing in winter, hiking, fishing, camping in summer. So, well an old man I'd met who had lived there over 50 years said he'd never seen such an abominably wet cold summer. I was due to give a little talk to a bunch of Western writers, I don't mean writers who'd met for a conference out west, but men and women who professionally write about the history of the cattle kingdom or the James brothers or barbed wire or, like one man I know well, was just finishing a novel called The Committee of Vigilance, a factual fictional semi-demi account of the tragic short period in San Francisco vigilante history after the discovery of gold on the American River.

Well I was saying, I was going to do a little Sunday evening talk to some of these writers and the man organising the event thought the nicest thing would be to have a barbecue in a mountain meadow on a friend's ranch 1200ft above Jackson, 7,200ft that is. It's always at this time of the year about 65, 70 in the long golden evenings, so they set up a tent to accommodate 90 people they expected, delightful a gorgeous prospect.

Came Sunday afternoon, colossal rumblings and collisions in the mountains, thunder coming our way. The very high, the very lonely snow capped peaks way up above us wrapped around in fog and great beards of white mist poking down over us and, bam, the rains came. Well these people earned their livings by admiring the toughness and self-sufficiency of the earliest westerners and their not to be put off by thunder, fog and slanting rainstorms. The last mile of our trek meant driving through the squishy mud of dirt roads. We arrived at the tent, a pretty brave young woman, I mean brave and pretty, was dispensing drinks as if she were behind the bar at the Ritz and the rain dropping off her nose to dilute the protein.

I said to the organiser, "Look, I've written at length about the west, I've paid my tribute to the pioneers I don't have to be here do I, this is not a lecture tent, this is a pneumonia clinic." I was about 30 years older than anyone present and they saw my point, they wrapped me round in a huge polo coat somebody had laid his hands on and stowed me in a car with a soothing healing container of the crop of Scotland. The rain stopped, the wind died down, the sides of the tent, which had been flapping like the Bounty in a hurricane fell limp. Suddenly, I heard through the window of the car, the voice of the man who was going to introduce me, it sounded remarkably like the voice of my son. It was the voice of my son, himself an active Western novelist.

It was a great relief not so much to be with one's own kith and kin as to recognise at once that the microphone actually worked. The only anxiety I have speaking anywhere is about the effectiveness of the microphone. I always test it beforehand; it is bad or ineffective in the dandiest places. Recently, I did a speech at Yale. After 20 seconds I decided to cut my remarks from 10 minutes to three because all the wealth and technology of the Yale University could not procure a microphone that was easy on the listener's ears.

I remember Arthur Koestler, the dissident who'd suffered in a Nazi camp and a Communist camp and who finally got to England. On his first visit to the United States he spoke in Carnegie Hall and I was eager to hear him and I was there. A very brief introduction was fairly inaudible because I guessed the speaker was a mumbler who didn't know how to use a microphone. Then came Koestler, the microphone echoed and squawked and booed and squealed, he paused he tried again, say pandemonium. The chairman was called, an engineer was called, finally it worked. Koestler began by saying, "Please don't be embarrassed for me, I have always wanted to see what was meant by American know-how". Well up there at the foot of the mighty pointed Titans, I bundled out of the car and the microphone was good enough to allow me to talk naturally and a good time I believe was had by all.

Of the 90 who bought tickets, 75 showed up rugged like midwinter Eskimos, but the effect of this clammy summer on the tourist season is one reason why yet another state may request federal disaster insurance. All in all, the Midwestern floods, the Southern drought, the Northwest coldest summer in history, the burning heat everywhere else all this adds billions on billions to the minimum federal budget and pretty soon will run into money.

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