As I write this, the temperature hit
106ᵒ
here in Kansas City. We’re under a Severe Heat Warning from the National
Weather Service to go through the weekend, so when you read this it’s likely it
will be even hotter here. We’ve had our first heat deaths of the season. There will
be more, unfortunately. Across the Midwest and the Southwest, triple-digit
temperatures are popping up all over.
In other parts of the nation, large
swathes of the country are in flames. Colorado is burning, even in Colorado
Springs, I understand. The Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana is burning—110,000
acres. New Mexico, like Colorado, is facing the worst wildfire in state
history. Arizona and Texas have also been battling wildfires.
Many of us in that huge middle of the map are
under the broiler or in the flames. I don’t remember summers being so hot when
I was young—and I grew up in a time when very few individuals had air
conditioning. Even motels often didn’t have any, so those who did would trumpet
it as a huge selling point. “Icy-cold air-conditioned rooms.”
People had fans, including attic
fans, so summer’s accompaniment was always the quiet whirr of the fans. In
parts of the South and the desert areas, people had lumbering swamp coolers,
which used water to cool by evaporation. The extreme humidity in Kansas City
made that a poor choice for this part of the country.
Back in the day, people had big
screened sleeping porches. Others slept out in their own backyards, hoping for
a breeze. Those without either amenity (because they lived in apartments or
other shared housing) took their quilts and mats to lie on and headed for the
city parks to sleep during the hottest nights of summer. The parks were full of
families sleeping when the highest temperatures hit.
The heat doesn’t seem to have bothered us as
much back then—or perhaps it never bothers little kids that much. I do,
however, remember a great heat wave in Kansas City the summer I was pregnant
with my youngest. Although air-conditioned homes were quite common by then,
many people died—older people and poor people. They no longer felt safe sleeping
outside or on screened porches and couldn’t afford air conditioners. My baby
was born in late July that summer, and I was miserable in the final stages of
pregnancy without any air conditioning.
My father-in-law had given us a
massive window air conditioner that would cool the whole first floor, but it
needed a special outlet and my husband at the time refused to pay to have it
installed. We argued and wrangled over it, and I thought I would die of heat
prostration before the baby could be born. In the newspapers and on TV news,
the heat death toll mounted with no end in sight.
Finally, my youngest son was born.
In those days, they kept mothers and babies longer in the hospital after even
normal births, and he had some jaundice to deal with. Normally, I hate every
minute I must spend in the hospital and try to talk doctors into letting me out
early, but not that summer of the deadly heat wave. The hospital was air
conditioned.
Three days before we were due to return
home, I calmly informed my husband that I wasn’t taking my son home to become a
new heat-death statistic. If he didn’t have the air conditioner installed by
the time we were released, I would have a cab take us to a motel and would stay
there until he did or the heat broke—whichever came first. I was determined,
and he could see it. So the air conditioner was installed, as he moaned over the
$300 it had cost to install the outlet (when he spent more than that on golf
clubs). For the rest of the heat wave, I kept the baby sleeping in his play pen
in the living room and slept there myself along with the older kids—and the
husband.
I live in an old house and its
window air conditioners do the job just fine until temperatures reach about 98ᵒ.
After that, it’s a losing battle for them against the heat and humidity. But I’m
truly grateful to have them, nonetheless. Every year when the 100ᵒ+ temps
hit, I know I’ll read of deaths of people who don’t have that ability to even
partially cool their living quarters and themselves.
So I’m sending blessings and prayers
to all living in these areas of high temperatures and to all who live within
reach of the wildfires. May you be cool and dry and, above all, safe.
What do you remember of ways to
handle excessive heat when you were a child?
