Summer in Seattle is an experience of collective hypomania, three months when the entire city tries to cram in as much activity as possible before the light disappears again. Our daylight, which ends by 4:00 p.m. in December, stretches until after 10:00 in July. The mist dries up, and the temperature rises to our upper-tolerable limit of seventy-seven degrees. Like nineteenth-century Austrians, we take the air to cure ourselves of the damage seasonal affective disorder has done to our minds and hearts.
