It’s hot. This summer we’ve had twenty days of 100+ heat in Boise, Idaho. That ties the record set in 2003, and there is no way we are done yet. Back in 2003, the Wife and I were at a different stage in life. We lived in a similar style home to the one we live in now. It was only about twelve miles from where we currently live. That neighborhood was only slightly more likely to involve outraged spouses attempting to run each other over in the driveway. (That happened twice within two blocks of our house. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same couple both times.)
One thing was different back then. Unlike now, we didn’t have AC money. We had swamp cooler money.
For those of you not familiar with swamp coolers, they are basically rusted out, leaky boxes lined with filters and dripping water. Add a big fan to the mix and you get the picture clear enough. They blow wet air into your house…not necessarily cool air. And let me tell you, one-hundred-degree wet air is no mercy.
Last time around, the Wife and I got a bit desperate. I’m from Texas. I would like to say I was a man through the whole process. And if by being a man I mean being a whiney mess, then yes, I was most definitely a man the whole miserable time. But here is the thing. While Texas is an everyday sweat lodge (minus the psychedelic trip…most days), we had air conditioning. Sweat your ass off during the day, chill your buns at night. As for anyone in Texas without air conditioning—may God have mercy on your soul.
During the heat wave of 2003, when it reached a humid 88-degrees inside, at night, I cracked. After the first week, I started buying bags of ice for the tub. I started running the numbers for any hotel room with working AC. But when you don’t have AC money, you sure as hell don’t have hotel with AC money.
The heatwave of 2022 has served as a reminder for me; sometimes we humans pay the price for our hubris. Building cities in the dessert. Saddling nature and just daring her to buck us off. SLC is running out of water. The salt lake is dried up. Meanwhile Vegas is flooding. Our electrical grid is aging. Yeah, I know. Wah, wah, wah. (I told you I could get whiney.)
Now that I can afford the luxury, I’m tempted to crank up the AC in response to the record setting heatwave. (My AC unit is 25+ years old, but they still made them like tanks back then.) I’m tempted to simply thumb my nose from inside my artificially cooled house and never even notice the neighbors who are sleeping on their stoops in an effort to find respite from the heat. That’s the thing I’m making myself remember during this heat wave—comfort can cut us off. Convenience can isolate us from reality and from our neighbors. When I can set a timer to automatically water my lawn and drip irrigate my garden while I’m asleep in bed, it’s pretty damn easy to take that water for granted. That doesn’t mean the well (or aquifer or reservoir) can’t still dry up.
Just because I’m sleeping comfortably in my chilled bedroom doesn’t mean I don’t have elderly neighbors struggling to breathe at night. Just because I’m not struggling through this heat wave doesn’t mean my neighbors aren’t wanting to run down their loved ones in the street. And if a bag of ice from the neighborhood Albertsons can deter a single case of heat-aggravated assault, then I certainly have the power to make my neighborhood a little less ragey sort of place.
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