Editorial introduction by Gene Weingarten: Taking the Heat

THE LONG FEVER

Miami Herald, The (FL)
June 23, 1985
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

My friend Leonard spent one summer in an old wood house with two rooms and no AC, just a weak electric fan to beat at the hot air. Leonard did not grasp Heat. He had no truck with the laws of physics. Nearly half the year we have a heat wave in Florida, a long fever we call Summer, but Leonard could never accept the heat, he could not believe that a beneficent God would make the very air so vile, so unbreathably fungal, and it was the peculiar manner of Leonard's mind to take the weather as a personal affront. He felt like Job, singled-out for unjust torment. "This is completely uncalled for," he said to me almost every morning. "I reject this."

He wanted to beat nature. He thought it was simply a matter of will. He was the kind of guy who would cuss as soon as he woke up, grunting the invective as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. Thus he rose each day, defiant. Ill-humored till nightfall, he periodically would abuse and harass the atmosphere. Through his anger and contrariness he hoped to preserve his humanity, to save his dignity from the corruptions of nature.

He did not grasp the truth: One must love the heat in Florida. One must love it the way Winston Smith loved Big Brother at the end of Orwell's 1984, love it blankly, with a dog's pure love of its master.

Florida heat is no more negotiable than summer. And summer dominates the calendar. It is the most significant season: Winter is low-key and pleasant, fall and spring are mostly hypothetical, but summer is theatrical, hammy, demanding attention. We are forced to adapt to what is essentially a hostile environment, forced to survive. People become animals, they pick up small habits of self-preservation.

I've spent all my summers but one in Florida, and I think it is safe to say that in this subtropical peninsula the summer is the damnedest thing.

The rules change. Laziness becomes a strategy. The constant presence of sweat is itself a major force in our lives, changing our fashions, our hygiene, our movements. The rich can pretend nothing has changed, dash from one artificially cooled box to another (I hear there are air-conditioned garages in some places, though I've never seen one), and the richest head north to Cape Cod or the mountains. Once, almost everyone left Florida by Easter. Henry Flagler might have been the founding father of South Florida, but you wouldn't have caught him dead here in July.

Most people catch the heat squarely on the chin. We start to drive crazily. We cuss more. We read shallow books. We see shallow movies. The smart ones make sure not to think too hard, because thinking raises the body heat. The heat does something to our repressions, too. A criminal mood comes over the city and though the streets are empty and desolate by day, they are overrun at night with shirtless strangers and teen punks. You wonder who's carrying a piece, who's got a blade.

There is an enemy out there. But it isn't human, and it isn't the heat. It's the despair . . . despair born of a futile struggle against the fever. There is only one reasonable response: Give up.

This idea of surrendering to the heat, of letting it enter you, of learning to love it, is not something that I just made up. Some hard-core Floridians, survivors of many hundreds of Florida summers, have been telling me that the heat is a fabulous thing. Or they say they are so used to hot weather that they don't pay it any mind, they bat not an eyelash when lizards start to sizzle on the sidewalk.

I called up Ben Hill Griffin, Jr. in Frostproof. He is the last of the great orange barons in Florida, a famous man who lives in a famous little town. Griffin once took me to lunch at his country club -- his, as in he owns the place -- and it was clear that he is not rich for nothing. He is canny. I figured he must have a strategy for surviving the summer. He does. Cotton suits. Plenty of shade. Easy living. But he also uses mental strategems, not unlike pretending. He simply decides each summer that the weather is not hot.

"Lawd o'mercy, I just think it's delightful. It's just ridiculous talking about Florida being hot in the summertime," he told me. "My God A'mighty, I've known people who been down here 107 years and never got bothered by the heat. I hate to leave down here in the summertime. It's just great!"

The man actually said that.

When I talked to Chuck Corbin Sr. out at Slim's Fish Camp on Lake Okeechobee, he gave me a lesson in the twin subjects of heat and mosquitoes, which according to him are inextricably linked. Corbin says the skeeters won't bite and the heat won't hurt if you think and act cool. "Don't slap 'em," he said. And don't talk too fast. Don't make gestures. Just talk slow. Just be cool. Like a real Southerner. That's how they get by at Slim's Fish Camp.

I asked Corbin to come up with a tale about hot weather. He thought about it for three weeks before calling me back.

"There was a farmer one time. It was in the middle of July, and he was out harvesting his corn. It got so hot, the corn started poppin'. His field turned white and his mule froze to death cause he thought it was snow.

"That's an old story. I thought of it yesterday while I was pulling a backhoe out of a canal."

Corbin lived in the heat long before AC hit town, and he isn't afraid to sweat.

"When you're outside, you gotta sweat. I usually wear a long-sleeve cotton shirt, or sometimes I wear a sweatshirt. You get your sweatshirt all wet with sweat and it's just like walking around in the air conditioning. Of course sometimes when you get in a closed-up room after being outside all day, it might not smell too good. But that's what they made showers for."

It goes without saying that the people who crab the most about the hot weather tend to work in an air-conditioned environment. Cecil Barnard doesn't have that problem. He is a general contractor who specializes in paving, and paving is the penultimate in hot work. As if the climate isn't cruel enough, the pavers have to handle molten asphalt that hits 315 degrees. Barnard, 64, once turned the bottom of his feet into giant blisters, despite shoes. A few years ago his crew paved a Miami Beach street surrounded on three sides by buildings. No wind possible. One by one, 15 workers passed out. Five were taken to the hospital.

"You don't feel like you're breathing air," Barnard said. "You can suck in a breath, but there doesn't seem to be any oxygen in it."

When he gets hot, he maintains his dignity. He doesn't dump buckets of water on his head. He only pours a little on his wrists.

Paving is, as I said, only the penultimate in hot work: the ultimate is roofing. I called up Al Springer, who's 59 and has been roofing for 39 years. Springer says his workers pass out all the time. Not him. Just younger guys. They plunk over without warning. Springer puts them in the shade, won't let them drink anything cold.

"No cold water. Boy, that'll put the bear on yer stomach. You gotta drink faucet water," he said.

He swears he'll never leave South Florida, not even in July.

"I can't stand that cold weather," he said, emphatic. "I get on the north side of Flagler Street and I start shaking."

I have dug up our Heat file, which is conveniently located in a cool room down the hall. Among other things, the Heat file contains 27 stories about fans. Electric fans. Ceiling fans. Hand fans. Elvis fans, too, but I'm not counting those. One of the stories in front of me actually goes to great lengths to describe a fan: "A motor turns a one-piece blade unit that is held to the motor shaft by C clips and washers or by a setscrew. For safety, the blade unit is covered by grilles on both sides of the fan housing. A switch regulates the speed of the motor and, sometimes, the direction of rotation. . . ."

And so on. I think I shall write nothing more about fans.

Here's a story of the kind that is so scary the editors bury it deep in the paper: "Nobel Prize-winning scientist Melvin Calvin told Congress Thursday that there are dangerous indications the earth's temperature has started to rise and the trend could threaten human life within 50 years if not abated. 'We don't have too much time,' Calvin said. . . . "

This is a good one: "When doctors first tried to take Willie Jones' temperature, it rocketed off the scale. Hospital personnel called him "The Human Torch." Now Jones is recovering from heat stroke -- and a 116.7-degree fever believed to be the highest anyone ever has survived."

Some of these articles are horrifying. One from 1976: "Heat stroke, not a virus or a germ, killed five elderly residents of a Boynton Beach nursing home last week. . . . Nineteen persons became ill in addition to the five who died when the air conditioning system at the Boulevard Manor nursing home broke down for five days."

And this from 1979:

"Two infant girls became ill and died Thursday in a cramped, stuffy unlicensed nursery operating in a duplex in Northwest Dade."

And this, from 1966:

"Police said Tuesday they will not file charges against Mrs. G----- L-----, whose three children died Monday after three hours in a hot, tightly closed car. . . ."

There are too many stories in the Heat file.

In South Florida there are a few people who are paid to cerebrate about the heat, to philosophize about that which most people merely suffer. I wanted to know if the general ideas about heat are supported by fact, and whether, for example, there is any way to keep a car from getting so intolerably hot in the sun, so I steeled myself against the elements and drove down to the National Hurricane Center, on the sixth floor of an antennaed building on Dixie Highway in Coral Gables. The weathermen, it turns out, work in an office that is very well air-conditioned.

Quick to answer questions was Ray Biedinger, a straight- talking meteorologist who is the author of a document called "Apparent Temperature: Its Meaning and Computation."

Biedinger is a reassuring person to know, because he has at his fingertips the number charts that can quantify the heat, verify it, put it in the realm of the known, rather than leaving the heat to the vague pronouncements of storytellers and dumbheads and solipsists.

"Is it true that it's not the heat, it's the humidity?" I asked him.

"That's right. The higher the humidity, the harder it is for perspiration to evaporate," he said.

"How can people avoid hot cars? What can be done?" I asked.

He screwed up his cheek, pensive. I could tell that no question would be too mundane for this man.

"If you have the time, you should open the door, and let the heat out," he said.

"Should you crack the windows?"

"Yes, but that makes it easier for thieves."

"Do tinted windows help?"

"Yes."

"What should people do to stay cool?"

"Spend as much time as possible where it's air- conditioned."

I was writing as fast as I could.

"Does hot weather make a person dumber?"

"It makes you slower reacting. Because of the stress that's put on your body, when it's hot and humid, the body is working harder to keep you cool."

He produced some numbers. I didn't like them.

His numbers show that South Florida has milder summers than central and northern Florida. The average high temperature in Miami in August is less than that of Avon Park, or Bartow, or Palatka, small dusty towns where the air never moves and even the insects bitch. The all-time hottest moment in Florida history occured not in South Florida but way up in the panhandle town of Monticello, a fat 109 on the thermometer. But even that doesn't rate against the record for North Dakota: 121 degrees. It once hit 115 up in Alberta, Canada. The Miami record: a measly 100, on July 21, 1942, virtually arctic by heat wave standards.

These numbers were unacceptable. Biedinger had no respect for the concept of latitude. A closet flat-earther, I suspected.

But then he produced his document on Apparent Temperature.

"Apparent Temperature," the report states, "is the perceived air temperature or a measure of what hot weather 'feels like' to the average person for a given temperature and relative humidity."

Yes, what it "feels like," that is the important thing.

Like if it was 90 degrees out and 70 percent humid, not uncommon for swampy South Florida. Biedinger whipped out a line graph and followed a curve.

"105 degrees," he said.

That's in the shade.

"It feels like 115 if you're standing in the sun."

Apparent Temperature is yet more complex. Wind velocity figures into the equation. So does air pollution. So does noise. Biedinger's graph went up to only 151 degrees, and beyond that there was only white space, which seemed appropriate since that kind of heat would mean we had died and gone to Hell.

Then Biedinger said something really interesting. A stiff wind on a hot day -- above 98.6 degrees -- is a bad thing.
Somehow it makes us hotter. This goes against the grain of logic, but Biedinger has the numbers in cold ink. I have a friend who drives around during the summer in an un-air- conditioned car with all the windows just slightly cracked. She claims that through some quirk of nature, cold air will come out of the vents -- cold air. I tried it and baked. But maybe I lacked faith. Maybe Apparent Temperature should take into account a final factor: Notions and Hearsay.

Biedinger gave me another document -- I think he "leaked" it to me, since it was supposed to be officially published sometime down the road -- called "Heat Wave: A Major Summer Killer," written by government weathermen. It reveals what we commoners have been suspecting all along, that the heat is killing us, killing us worse than lightning, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined, and not only killing us but also making us really uncomfortable, and I quote:

" . . . There are times when large sections of the United States remain free of the jet stream's cooling influence. In its wake stagnant air masses prevail. Day after day the strong sun, unimpeded by clouds, scorches the land. With little air movement, especially in populated areas, automobile and industrial pollutants are trapped and cast a smoggy pall. Debilitating humidity, released from tropical waters, further adds to the oppressive misery. . . . Thus, sometimes all the ingredients are present and the stage set to produce a major summer killer: the heat wave. . . ."

The government weathermen tell us all this horrible stuff, but what to do they tell us to do? Drink water. Don't overexert. Stay in the AC.

Thanks a lot.

During summer the storms come. They appear above the horizon like a black wall. The air becomes electric.

At night I watch heat lightning from my balcony. Another reporter here has told me that there is no such thing as heat lightning. Heat has nothing to do with it, he says. What we see is just the reflection in the clouds of lightning over the horizon. He has the facts. But I still like to watch the clouds flash with blue, noiseless, and that will always be heat lightning to me.

The flashes remind me of when I was a kid, when lightning and other primitive forces held a greater fascination. Kids have a closer connection to the elements, to nature. They don't brood about the heat, they just sweat and look for the storms. I liked to run around in the rain, once. I ran fast and wild, in circles, utterly happy. Now I stay indoors.

I remember that we used to dig holes on hot days, and grovel down in the dirt, like hounds. There was a creek nearby and we dammed it constantly. We sucked on Goofy Grape Kool-Aid ice cubes. We jumped through the sprinkler. Summer was the best season, because there was no school, just empty time to build tree forts and play with dogs and wait to grow up. I slept on a hardwood floor, because it was cool.

When we got older we went to the springs. The springs were physically and psychologically cooling. It was like being in a different climatological zone, like San Francisco on a foggy summer day, cool and dark and damp. The starved minnows nibbled at our toes.

I still dream about those places. There are no swimmable springs in South Florida. There used to be, but they dried up when the swamps were drained. Nowadays I rely on technology more than I used to. I lower my thermostat each night to the coldest setting, seal the windows against any incoming photons, and sleep under a blanket in absolute abyssal darkness, lost in deep space.

I'm making a mistake. A person cannot escape the heat.

It always chooses one moment to prove its omnipotence. The revelation usually comes sometime in late July or August, the dog days. All summer you swear you will be superhard, all summer you set your jaw tight against your skull, like Don Shula, but eventually the moment arrives, the moment of absolute discomfort, beyond which lies servility . . . and wisdom.

It happens in the afternoon. You are driving on Dixie Highway. The traffic could induce homicide in a Campfire Girl. The air conditioning is unequal to the challenge. The radiator is overheating. You realize your elbows and knees are sweating. Your teeth are sweating. You feel like you have crawled out of a petri dish.

And then the traffic comes to a halt.

And you are stuck behind a Metrobus.

And it is belching diesel smoke.

The moment has come. You start making sounds. They are not human.

I called up my old friend Leonard the other day. I figured he would be the last person on earth to submit to the heat. Leonard has gone around the world and ended up in the same place, hot Florida. He is a great guy but girls are put off by the scars on his head. He drives a convertible and smokes his cigs to the butt, and works at this and that, mostly outdoors. I told him I had to write about the heat.

He ventured that there would be nothing to say. He said, "I like to work in it. When it's 105 degrees by 10:00 in the morning. Manual labor. You can't think. You can't use your brain. I don't know if that's good or bad. That's just the way it is."

I guess he had learned, at last, the lesson.

If you surrender, you are free -- free to sweat, free to reek, free to laze around on the porch with a cold Bud and no ambition, free to laugh and cuss and grunt, free to run around in the rain like a kid. There is a word that perfectly defines the summer heat in South Florida, a word that describes what you have become:

Uncivilized.

Memo: COVER STORY
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 10
Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald