Some like it hot

The Geiger Counter

For all of human history, for however many hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of years we have walked the Earth, we have known, not just in our minds, but in our bodies and our bones, that the world around us does not bend to our whims and desires. The fabric of reality is not a cloak we have the power to dye.

If the world was hot, we were hot. If the world was cold, we were cold. The little moments around a fire, or in a cool stream, were the exceptions, not the rule. Today, we live in a world of our own making, a fantasyland that we designed to fool us into thinking that we are gods who control the light and the dark, the heat and the cold, every infinitesimal detail of existence. The internet had tricked us into believing we are all-knowing, all while it makes us dumber and a little worse at seeing and understanding the select few things that we have the capacity to really know and understand. But being a God, even a pretend one, comes with myriad horrors and responsibilities to endure, and so we run around, jumping from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car, asking our phones what the weather is like outside, all while living in a fabricated prison that is really just a petri dish of hollow sadness and despair. The good news is our jail has few guards, and we are free to leave anytime we want.

Our air-conditioning broke last week, three days before the year’s biggest heatwave.

My daughter noticed water leaking in the garage, so I followed it to its source, our ancient air conditioner, which has valiantly sent cool air throughout the house for decades but chose to give up its mortal coil at a time that feels, frankly, a little rude.

When the technician came and looked, he told me the price to replace it. I think he said it would cost $5,000, but he might also have said 25 million ducats, 3,000 trombones or 25 stoned bonobos. Whatever it was, it was something I don’t currently have or even know how to obtain by any means short of piracy.

We were left with only one option: Do nothing and pray for the heatwave to end.

My wife and I decided we would not fix the AC, and would instead sweat for a while. Each time the heat became unbearable, we’d simply remind ourselves that we had not recently spent a large amount of money that we didn’t have to begin with. The thought would keep us cool enough.

I grew up without air conditioning, and I remember the daily routine in our old farmhouse, opening the windows each evening, letting in the breeze, then sealing up the home each morning to capture whatever stray bits of cool air had wandered into our living space.

I later lived in a trailer in Florida, which had only a single window unit, a bawling golden calf before which I would often supplicate myself, sitting inches from it and listening to its roar as I wondered what the people on television might be saying to one another. It would often grow weary from the effort and simply pass out, suddenly quiet in the buzzing, swampy heat. And I would cook in my little, rusty home.

If I could survive heat waves in Massachusetts and Florida, I could certainly survive one in Wisconsin, a place where it never even gets very hot at all. I’ve spent enough time elsewhere to know that 100 degrees is generally when the weather starts to feel genuinely hot. That, in my experience, is when it’s best to take it easy and wait for cooler winds to arrive. In much of the world, weather in the 80s and 90s is completely normal. My college girlfriend was from Alabama, and the average temps there during much of the summer are well over 90 degrees. In fact, the average high each day in July, in this part of Wisconsin, is 82 degrees, which is only a few degrees cooler than the current heatwave.

But Wisconsinites are not good at handling heat, even the mild kind. They tend to react as if the sun is mere seconds from crashing into the Earth. Think of the scene in which people flee in terror right before the bomb hits in every movie about the apocalypse, and you can get a pretty realistic sense of how Wisconsinites behave every August. Every year, I hear people complain incessantly about the heat on sunny, beautiful summer days if the temperature dares to stray into the upper 80s. People around here would rather go to a public pool and bathe in urine and chlorine while listening to horrible music all day, than just exist in a world where the sun is shining and your body miraculously, automatically places water on your skin to cool you down.

In any case, the heatwave has been a little rough at times, but there have been several unexpected side effects.

For one thing, it has allowed us to once again reconnect with the vast changes that occur in the natural world each day and night. We no longer have to ASK our phones what the weather is like outside, because we know exactly what the weather is like at every moment, and we are living in it.

It means the air in our house, while hotter, smells and feels a little better, perfumed as it is by the trees and flowers and grass just outside our windows.

Best of all, it has forced us together, all seeking out the cool places, all sitting together, sometimes sweating, sometimes just enjoying the feeling of the world as it cools down for the night. We are a closer family because we don’t have central air, and that’s a warm and fuzzy feeling – a very warm and fuzzy feeling – indeed.

Most importantly, it’s a reminder that we can’t always get what we want, and that’s a good thing; a terrible burden lifted off of our shoulders.

It is so incredibly easy to reconnect with the world. To be hot in the summer and experience it with your family. To go outside in the winter and feel the frost playfully nipping at your extremities, reminding you that it could kill you, and has killed millions of your ancestors, and yet here you are, today, because it spared so many others who came before you. Because the world has not gone away. It is us who left. WE have gone away, hiding in our pretend reality, bickering with strangers about things that have never mattered to begin with. Pretending that we are warring gods, when in fact we are nothing more, or less, than hairless hominids gifted, each of us, with a few years to walk the Earth and marvel at how small we are. Spend your time wisely. Or spend it idiotically. The choice is yours. But at least spend your time out here, in the real world, from time to time.

I listened to mostly hip hop and grunge music when I was young, because I wrongly believed I was too cool, in a different sense than the one described above, to enjoy most genres. But one of the few country songs that made it to my ears had a chorus that stuck around: “Sometimes I thank God, for unanswered prayers.” I believe it, now that I’m a little older, sweltering here with my family, together, here in the real world again. When the heat wave ends, we will know it. When the first chill of autumn comes to coax the Earth into its winter sleep, we will feel its change, and we will know that nothing – not heat waves, not subzero nights, not even our little lives – lasts forever, but we are also part of something very big, and very ancient. We do not control it, but we get to be part of it, and that’s more than enough.

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The Great Outdoors

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