When the Mercury Rises

Hudson Avenue slopes down to the waterfront in Peekskill, NY, a cool morning, in contrast to the heatwave experienced the day before.

I sometimes wonder if violence—something most of us abhor, something we try hard to abstain from—has anything to do with the temperature. Especially when it creeps past 98 degrees and stays there, heavy and unrelenting.

I once saw an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that explored just that—the idea that sweltering heat might fray the last threads of human restraint. It was unsettling, oddly compelling, and a little too timely for what’s been unfolding lately.

Here in Peekskill, during the latest heatwave, a 13-year-old girl struck her mother with a frying pan after an argument. Disturbing, yes, but what unnerved me further was the response: the police arrived at Bohlmann Tower—our towering block of public housing on the west end of downtown—guns drawn, cocked, and ready for action. A child lashed out in what was likely a moment of instability or neglect, and terror met terror at her doorstep.

Was it just lack of discipline? Was it the mercury pressing down on already-strained nerves?

Elsewhere, in Johnsonville, South Carolina—where I went to high school—a 16-year-old was shot and killed in the Prospect community. It's the same area that once bore the notorious Pee Wee Gaskins, so tragedy isn’t foreign there. But this? This happened in the same oppressive heat.

And in nearby Lake City, another layer of sorrow: a funeral director—the same man who once oversaw my mother’s service—stabbed to death by his own daughter. In the same home, another conflict escalated until another person was shot and killed.
Is it the heat? Or is it something deeper in our collective DNA? A flicker of Cain, that first betrayer, buried in us all?

I woke today groggy but un-tempted by coffee—who needs hot bitterness when the air itself is already simmering? Still, I walked. Along the waterfront, the breeze off the Hudson offered relief, a little clarity. I was due to meet a dear friend at 1 p.m.—meant more as a walk-and-talk than a sit-down lunch—but the sun had other plans. I jogged to Charles Point instead, craving some rhythm, and found that the city, like me, had started to cool.
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Peekskill was smiling again. Under overcast skies—gray, familiar, forgiving—people moved like themselves again. A return to our rhythm, our New York grit. We can take on anything. But that kind of heat? That’s best left to the states where the cicadas shriek all summer long and the air forgets how to move.