I was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1961. A little red headed boy, pale white skin, I freckled in the sun, or burn. Back in the sixties, there was no sunscreen, no cable TV, no Gameboy or Nintendo. It was BB guns, bicycles, skateboards, you built an underground fort, threw rocks, flew a kite in the field. My range from the house before I was ten was a couple of miles. I drank out of the hose, swam in the canal by the flood gates, explored abandoned buildings. My time was spent outdoors, and it was hot.
I got horrible sunburns.
No way was a young kid going to stay inside, there was nothing to do. No internet, no information overload of anything. You want to know where your kid are? Look for their bike in the front lawn. We roamed a large area looking for pop bottles to take to the convenience store like Circle K or U-Totem. A candy bar was ten cents and if you used the mower to make $2 bucks for cutting the grass? Gas was a quarter for a gallon.
As I grew older, the desert sun always relentlessly waited for me in the summers. It seemed in the seventies here in Arizona, the big weather came from the southwest, chubascos, storms marching up the Sea of Cortez invading in to the Sonoran desert along with our monsoon. Dust storms we called them. A wall of dust from the ground up into the clouds many thousands of feet high rolled in from the east. In August, you got breaks from the heat when it rained.
Back then, we had swamp coolers. A big metal box on the roof of the house. An electric motor with a fan belt drove a cylinder fan inside of the box sucking air through the sides that were filled with a sort of a wood filament pad that a circulating pump would trickle water over. The air getting sucked through the pads would evaporate the water producing cool air that would get blown into the house through a network of ducts. It was called evaporative cooling or a swamp cooler. It was much cheaper than refrigeration, HVAC (heating, ventilation and cooling) systems but it took water running water to cool the house. During the summertime when the humidity rose, the evaporative cooling didn’t work as well, it was still hot, but now you were hot, sweaty, muggy and it was miserable.
During the summer, it would be 100+ degrees for 100 days. It was hot and for a red head that was better equipped to live in England, Scotland or Whales, the intense dry heat sun cooked me. The heat tolerance was beaten out of me. The heat weakness was accumulating, opposite, it squeezed the tolerance out of me not to be replaced but to be left with a limited time each year.
As our city grew, the desert fields became infilled with buildings, parking lots, cement. Air conditioning units pumping out hot air. Everything contributed to the accumulation of heat.
People just got tired of it
They became cranky, irritated, hot under the collar. It’s odd, you could be standing there in the shade one day, just a trickle of sweat on your forehead, 110 degrees and you were not sweaty, just hot. A few days later when the monsoon came, you would be soaked in sweat, the humidity too high for the evaporation to work.
In August, this is when that would happen and people were just about done being cooked. So was I. Done with the oppressive heat, done trying to tolerate it, I needed to escape it.
I was done in August.
Years and years of this made me dread August. The heat, the pissed off people, the intense traffic. Phoenix is now the fith or six largest city in America. Drive a car a hundred miles an hour for an hour in a straight line and that’s how big Phoenix is. And it’s hot.
Over all the years I started to sing my sad August song to my friends, my wife, my kids and now you.
“If I can get through August, I’ll live another year.”
It’s not even July and I’m thinking about it. I dread it. I’m not moving either. You move. I love my life here, my family is here and I finally got to know where the good stuff is. I’ve spent all my time here, I’m not moving. But damn, it’s getting hot, August is coming.
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