Made in the shade

Recently, I was in a little gas/burger/coffee pit/piss stop of a town called Kettleman City. It's on Interstate 5 in California, on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, at the intersection of 46 and 5. It's a place that gets scorching hot in the summer. Hell, that burg gets roasted in the spring. I was driving around the various burger joints, looking for a tree under which to park and do some phone calling/texting. The pickings were very slim. Saplings and stop signs weren't gonna get it done. Finally, I found a little tree at the Taco Bell that was adequate and unoccupied, so I hung there for the next 20 minutes, being a good citizen and not doing all my texting on the road by bellowing at Siri.

Anyway, my point—in the future, a future that's looking more and more like it's going to be warmer and warmer and sunnier and sunnier—there might well be a lot of money in—shade.

Seriously. Shade might just become a really big deal. And even a viable industry. I know that little hellburg Kettleman City sure could have used some. I couldn't help but think that if a burger joint called Shady's was there, and it was a place with a huge, cool-looking shade structure under which customers could park, that place would do nothing but kick Mickey D's, Jack's and Carl's collective butts, because those places all feature your basic standard cheap no-shade parking lot. People are drawn to shade like they're drawn to natural water features like creeks and lakes. Businesses in the future just may get an edge by paying attention to this reality. In fact, I saw this attraction in action in a town that's very aware of solar bombardment.

It was about 10 years ago, when our camp at Burning Man erected a giant tent structure on the playa. Not a tent to sleep in, but really more like a large canopy. It covered a lot of ground and made quite a bit of shade. And that shade was a draw. A big draw. People would just sort of get sucked in by its innate, elemental attractiveness, visibly swerving in from the street to say hello, hang out, look weird, swap stories, have a cold one, but mainly just to get the hell away from that relentless star that was pounding the juices out of them out in the streets. We didn't need free pancakes or free beer or free baby wipes to meet new burners. All we had to do was provide shade.

So if you want your playa place to be popular this year, you can always roll with the simple pleasure that is shade. Make some. You'll be able to sit back and watch people get sucked into your cool darkness. And don't be surprised if, in 2020, you see a company called Shadeco kicking ass on the NYSE.