In The Heat
When you live in the heat it changes everything. When you rise, when you sleep, when you work, when you don’t, when you make love, ( mostly you don’t ). There is a crude expression out here; It’s too hot to f&%k, and sadly that is often true.
It dominates everything, each decision includes a heat calculation, because it must. The desert doesn’t care about you and will kill you if you are careless, either in a car or your house just out walking around. Work starts at dark thirty and is over by noon. Sleep happens in the middle of the day also, so you can rise at 6:00 p.m. and get things ready for the next day in the long shadows of the evening. 100 degrees in the shade at 7:00 pm really isn’t too bad, because you are wearing a long sleeve shirt you have dipped in a bucket of water that will take 20 minutes to evaporate and become dry, giving you 20 good minutes to accomplish something before you soak and do it again. When darkness sets in you must go home and force yourself to sleep somehow so you can rise and go to work in the darkness again in the morning.
110 or more in the direct sun is serious business, no matter how much you drink or how big or clever your hat is. The Body’s core temperature invariably begins to rise, and if you don’t bring it down somehow you get in real trouble pretty quickly. So you work for thirty minutes then cool down for 15 somehow, either going indoors, drenching in water, or just leaving. Some of us get more or less acclimated and some do not, and they are in real danger. Their skin turns bright pink, their eyes bug out, and a look of mild panic inhabits them. Those people go into the walk in cooler and have a seat in the 38 degree breeze until they are back in operational range. Then, if they can, they go back out and do it again. It is a terribly inefficient way to get work done, and as a boss it is maddening, but it works. Some things simply must be done here in the summer, and so we do them, as we can. We should marvel at and honor, somehow, the roofers and cement workers seen standing out in the midday sun in Las Vegas or Phoenix.
And, importantly, we complain a lot, because it is vastly therapeutic. Bitch, bitch bitch, about the heat, about the lack of rain, about the low pay, about biting horseflies, about the ugly local women, about the other workers whom you don’t think are carrying their share of the load, about your lousy car, about someone else’s shitty haircut, and on and on. It helps, it really does.
By August, any humor is gone. People show up and do the work they can and leave. Everyone is encouraged, and gently required, to leave town for a while. Take a vacation. Go to Utah, go to the Sierras, go to the coast, just go to Vegas and get a room and veg out by the pool for a couple of days. Relationships end, employment ends, sometimes badly, and everyone goes through the annual cathartic period of serious self examination. Why am I here? Have I wasted my life? Is this worth it on any level? What am I missing out there? The first few seasons it slides off into depression, but after a several years that becomes a predictable progression, and we know there is light at the end of the tunnel if we can just make it to September.
Shade is profoundly important. In an extremely dry climate the temperature difference of being in the shade vs. the sun is dramatic and immediate, perhaps 15 or 20 degrees. You seek out and claim any shadow, a bush, a telephone pole, squatting down behind a car, anything. Cars become huge thermal sinks if left in the direct sun, interior temperatures rising to 140 degrees and more if the windows are up. A new car with healthy air conditioning will still require 15 minutes or more to bring the interior temperature into tolerable range. Shade is your friend, and work is planned around the presence or absence of shade.
By September, it has affected you. If it was your first summer, you are not quite the same person you were in May. You have gone through a storm and you know it, and others who have not just cannot understand. You have seen the warts and deficiencies of the others around you, and they yours, and you kept going anyway. You have a little more respect for each other, even those you don’t like, because you did it. if you’ve done it before you become like an old tortoise, retreating into your shell and only coming out when you must. Your social skills may have suffered, but ah, well. And then, gradually, it begins to end. Night time lows dip below 80. The sun isn’t quite as high overhead, and a few tourists begin to trickle in. The heat is in seasonal retreat, you made it! Now, you have 7 months to plan for next summers escape, if you can
In the Heat
It scarifies and clarifies
It questions your existence
And judgement.
It steals you and steels you
Lovers leave and the world departs
Just you and the desert
And a few defective others.
Have I wasted my chance?
Have I missed my life?
Always remember,
You could have been stuck
In traffic on the 405
For the last fifty years
Instead.
