Temperatures have finally cooled down a bit, bringing with them some relief from the record highs of the previous week. Before the smoke settled in, things didn’t appear to be too much different: from inside looking out the sky was still clear, the sun was still blazing, and it still looked like high summer.
But there was a thin thread of cold running under the day, when you stepped outside, particularly in the morning; an indication that summer is starting to unravel and begin the change into fall. If, like me, you live in this region despite the sometimes intense heat, not because of it, it’s a welcome change.
The record-setting temperatures of a week ago, however, were depressing for another reason. Everywhere I looked, from comments on social media from locals to comments on stories about the heat in national newspapers, I saw plenty of remarks along the lines of “These are normal temperatures for this region in summer!” or “I remember plenty of days hotter than this!”
To be clear: Ashcroft hit a high of 41.1 C on Aug. 15 this year. That is a new record for that date, so it is very definitely not “normal”. According to Environment Canada, drawing on weather records in the area going back to 1944, the average mean temperature in Ashcroft on Aug. 15 is 30.5 C (mean temperature is the average of the maximum and minimum temperature at a location for a specified time interval).
Temperatures either side of Aug. 15 were similarly high: 37.7 C on Aug. 13, 39.2 C on Aug. 14, 37.1 C on Aug. 16, and 39.5 C on Aug. 17: all between eight and 11 degrees higher than the mean temperatures for those dates. So all those trying to argue that this is normal for Ashcroft in August should just stop, right now. Please.
As for the “I remember plenty of days hotter than this!” argument: you might think you remember an Aug. 15 when it was hotter than 41.1 C, but the facts show that you are — what’s the word I’m looking for — wrong. You don’t. You might think you remember it hotter, but it wasn’t, no matter how hot your car’s steering wheel was or what the thermometer up against the siding of your house in full sun on the back deck showed, or what your memory tells you.
That’s the thing about memory: it’s often wrong, or faulty, or selective, or unreliable. The other day my husband brought a charging cable into town, to look for a replacement, and swore he’d put it in the cupholder where I keep my sunglasses, but it wasn’t there when he went to fetch it. We searched the car, but to no avail. Finally I called Safety Mart, which had been our first stop, and they said someone had found it in the parking lot and turned it in. It had clearly been on his lap, and fallen to the ground when he got out of the car.
Yet he was very sure, in his memory of events, that he had placed that cable in the cupholder, which is between the front seats. That turned out to be a false memory, and of course there was no harm done, but very real harm can be caused when people insist that their memories are correct, even when facts — actual cold, hard, provable facts — show that their memories are wrong. It’s something we’re seeing over and over, particularly in the political sphere, where far too many people are not only convinced that their memories are correct (even when they’re not), they continue to cling to their perceived reality even when facts are presented that show them to be just plain wrong.
Memory is a wonderful thing, giving us the ability to recall happy times, places, events, and experiences. It’s also fallible, because we’re human beings. Don’t let facts take a back seat to the way we “remember” that things were or happened, because truth ends up being the innocent victim caught in the crossfire.
