by Beth McKibben

“What’s the temperature?”

During visits to my Granny’s house in Oxford, Alabama, answering this question meant stepping out onto the front stoop to peer down at the bank on the corner of Dodson Street and South Quintard Avenue. The bank had a digital time-and-temperature display, and when the numbers lit up, it looked a little like a vintage high-school stadium scoreboard. 

We visited Granny every July, a summer ritual bookended by a meandering two-day road trip to and from our home on the coast of Connecticut. Spending the month in Alabama allowed my mother to see her mother, siblings, and other relatives who were scattered around the state. 

Granny’s front yard was flat and mostly shaded, perfect for playing Wiffle ball and badminton with our cousins. The sun-soaked back steps behind the house provided a place to sit and shuck corn, shell beans, or eat slices of salted watermelon. In the evenings after dinner, we’d set out to chase fireflies. When it rained, we played on the front porch. 

July always brought sweltering heat to Alabama, and our mother insisted my sister and I spend the hours between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. indoors to avoid sunburn and heat exhaustion.

I was seven years old in July 1980, but I remember the incredible heat of that summer in Alabama. It was one of the worst heat waves in US history, scorching most of the Midwest to the southern plains, south to Texas and Georgia. 

Over eight days, from July 9 to July 17, midday temperatures throughout Alabama topped 100 degrees. One afternoon, my mother stepped onto the front stoop at Granny’s to check the temperature at the bank: 105. Shades were drawn, lights were turned off, and we were sequestered in the house until the sun went down. Thankfully my Granddaddy, who built the house in the 1950s, installed central air conditioning. 

Thunderstorms would break the 100-degree heat streak on the ninth day, but not before 80 percent of Alabama reached hellishly hot temperatures on July 17. The Birmingham suburb of Bessemer registered a record high of 108 degrees that day.

It’s estimated that farmers across Alabama lost 200,000 chickens and half of the state’s corn crop that summer because of the fiery temperatures. It was the first billion-dollar disaster in the country, hitting the agricultural industry the hardest. 

The unrelenting heat was directly linked to the deaths of more than 1,200 people, including 123 people in Alabama. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the 1980 heat wave may have indirectly caused the deaths of close to 10,000 people. 

Living in the South, we’re accustomed to memorable weather events. People gauge how old you are by which storms you remember. For my mother’s generation, it was hurricanes Camille (1969) and Frederic (1979). For my Gen X and millennial cousins and me, it was hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005). 

But heat waves, the silent killers of the weather world, don’t blow in like a big storm, leaving chaos in their wake. They’re ruthless, oppressive, and invisible, pushing down hard upon the land with such suffocating intensity it’s hard to move and even harder to breathe.

Fast forward forty-five years from that scorching summer in Alabama, and we are still talking about the weather in the South. Except today, events that used to be described as once-in-a-lifetime storms, generational heat waves, and 1,000-year floods occur more frequently and with more severity. Even so, the persistence of environmental activists and decades of work by scientists is paying off, at least in terms of awareness. And while some climate change skeptics question why our planet is warming, sea levels are rising, and storms are getting more ferocious, climate research continues to prove that the cumulative actions of human beings have profoundly affected the Earth and altered the weather in life-threatening ways.

The South would like a word. In this issue of Gravy, you’ll read stories on Southern farmers, foragers, seed-savers, soil scientists, and oystermen who not only work within the challenges of the South’s ever-changing climate but find ways to adapt and thrive. 

Illustrations document the destructive force of water and the resilience of farmers, captured in intimate vignettes of eight flash floods endured by one family over twenty-five years that swept through their 200-acre farm in central Kentucky.

Another story explores how the region’s seed savers are securing the future of what’s grown in the South by preserving traditional seed varieties and creating extreme weather–tolerant hybrids.

Still another story has you tagging along with an Atlanta writer as she learns to reconnect with the land, her community, and her ancestors on a foraging journey from Arabia Mountain to Buford Highway to yards in the city’s southeastern neighborhoods.

The stories in this issue neither sensationalize nor trivialize the real threats climate change poses to our foodways in the South. But through humor and self-reflection, tenacious reporting and storytelling, and breathtaking visuals, this issue of Gravy offers frank perspectives, some solutions, and, most importantly, hope.

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