Livin' in a Hot Place

 

An ocotillo in the hot New Mexico sun.

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In southern New Mexico and Arizona, the heat arrives in early June when the jet stream drifts poleward and high pressure creeps in from Mexico chasing the cooler air north. For at least a month until the monsoon begins, the sun drills down from cloudless skies and heat rises from the parched ground. With almost no humidity, the sun hits like a hammer.  

When we were in Kashgar, China in 2006 during the oppressive heat of the Central Asian summer, locals carried beds into their yards to sleep. In the warm evening after the sun relented, Uyghur men gathered around outdoor television sets smoking and talking in the light of flickering screens while outdoor food markets came alive with families socializing and eating fat-tailed sheep cooked on spits over smoky fires and sprinkled with spices. 

 

My mother died in May on a hot day in Cedar Park, Texas where she’d lived since leaving the humid swelter of the mid-Atlantic. She spent most of her 90 years in hot places, growing up in Enterprise, Alabama before air conditioning was the norm. Her father helped build the Pan American Highway, toiling in the tropical heat of Central America, a cigar clamped in his teeth. Later, he owned a furniture store where as kids we’d leave the coolness of the showroom to explore the hot dusty warehouse, shared with a feed store where a pet monkey swung from the rafters. On the street, men sold soggy bags of boiled green peanuts in the heat.

 

Extremes at both ends of the thermometer breed story tellers and songwriters. In wintry places, they huddle around fires, entertaining each other, their backs to the cold. Where it’s hot, they languish on porches, facing outwards from the shade into the bright sun, making up new stories and retelling old ones, glad they aren’t out in that infernal heat.

 

Heat in literature and movies is at least as evocative as location, enveloping us in its pall. Characters sweat and chafe, and passions run high. A writer (unnamed at the link below) observed that: 

 

“Humanity ferments in the heat. People become visceral, bodies betray minds with their baseness. Morals loosen along with muscles. Secrets spill out of open windows, buttons come undone. And while in reality we might groan more with perspiration then passion, fictional characters can be far more comfortable getting hot under the collar without so much as a desk fan for relief.” (Penguin Books)

 

Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett wrote the iconic The Front Porch Song watching East Texas pass by during a hot summer in College Station while trying to avoid being Texas A&M students. “This old porch is just a weathered, gray-hair seventy years of Texas,” Keen wrote. He mixes humor and nostalgia during live performances, pausing mid-song to describe his landlord dragging him off of the porch into the heat to help with chores:

 

“…our conversations were only interrupted by my landlord, Jack Boyett, who was 70 years old at the time. He’d roll up in the heat of the day and roll down the window on his pickup truck just enough to be heard and not enough to let any of the air conditioning escape, saying, ‘Robert Keen, Robert Keen. Can you come help me for a minute? I’d spend the rest of the day mowin’ lawns, movin’ furniture, diggin’ skinny cows out of the mud out there at his old ranch.”

 

Heat rounds off the edges and stretches out the vowels. The Southern Drawl. The Texas Twang. Slide guitar. Fatty food. It’s too hot for crisp transitions.

 

Landscapes that invited exploration in the cool of winter become barren hellscapes in triple-digit heat. Soap tree yuccas shimmer. Sand burns bare feet. Dust devils spin across white hot playas. Snakes come out. We go into the mountains looking for cool mornings and places to swim, hoping not to be squeezed off the tops of them by the warming climate, lucky if we have the means to migrate. 

 

But the heat is part of living in a desert, and just as we embraced the Wyoming cold, we will learn to tolerate New Mexico heat, getting up earlier to walk, napping, trimming the cat’s fur, drinking ice water. A little heat is a small price to pay for a long mild winter, and even in the worst of it, the evenings are perfect if you stay far enough back from the bbq grill.

Uyghur men in Kashgar after the sun has left.

A Uyghur boy pushes fat-tailed sheep on a market day in Kashgar.

My mother, Barbara McCall, on her porch in Enterprise, Alabama with pets. She lived in hot places (with pets) her whole life, and even kept her apartment in Texas at 80 degrees when she could turn the heat up that high.

My grandfather, Oscar Lee McCall, at his desk in his furniture store in Enterprise.

The view into Mexico from the Outer Mountain Loop in Big Bend National Park. Big Bend was so hot when we were there in February 2022 that we started hiking well before dawn. Later in the year, people routinely succumb to the heat.

A porch in West Texas.

Rollin' Smoke BBQ in Anthony, Texas.

The Dog Days of Summer

Summer in Laramie can be so perfect that you cling to every day, knowing that it doesn't last long.  Tonight, I sat on our back patio, a light breeze adding just enough cool to the warm air to make it exceptionally nice.  I looked around, realizing that from my vantage point, without moving from my chair, I could photograph a collection of objects that epitomize summer and home life.

Adirondack chair:  My Dad made this for us out of cypress wood from the southeastern U.S.  He lives in Virginia, and I don’t even remember how the chair made its way to Wyoming.  Now, years later, it’s finally falling apart, but it’s hard to part with.  I still use it to set things on—mostly plates of food to be grilled.  And I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away, even as it becomes more unsittable.

Plastic patio chair:  Like the one I’m sitting on.  We bought four of these some years ago; I can’t remember how many.  This year I hauled their cushions to the dump.  They were too decrepit to use and had been stored in the garage and covered with dust, but the chairs still work.  They aren’t as elegant as a handmade cypress Adirondack chair, but I sit in them anyway.  We have four.  For guests.  Sometimes, when the clothesline is full, I hang socks over the backs of them to dry.

Old Weber grill:  I live in a household of near-vegetarians.  Ellen and Bei eat chicken if it is organic and stripped clean of skin and bones and chicken fat.  Ellen also eats fish if it is absolutely fresh.  I relish red meat, and lovingly grill 0.81 pound Safeway rib eye steaks when I can’t go without for one more minute.  The grill is no longer air tight, so after I grill, all the charcoal burns up even when I put the lid back on.  It would probably be cheaper to buy a new grill than to keep buying charcoal, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Charcoal:  A bag of charcoal with hickory somehow embedded, stored in the garage.  It seems like a good idea to use charcoal that has hickory in it, even though I don’t really know what hickory tastes like.

Grill brush:  This was a gift from my  near-vegetarian family.  I heard on NPR that a clean grate is the key to good grilling.  Before I cook a rib eye, I scrape off the remains of the last one.  And Ellen and Bei feel better that before I grill vegetables I make an effort to remove the beef.

Tomatoes:  Ellen grows these every year, despite the short Laramie growing season.  They taste way better than the ones at the store, but when the green ones start to appear on the plants, it means that summer is almost over.  We move the plants into the laundry room before the tomatoes are ripe to save them from the first freeze, and we are usually well into winter snow before we finish eating the last fresh tomato.

Hose paraphernalia:  Ellen is the gardener in the family, and we have lots of this kind of shit in the garage and house, attached to the hose bib, and scattered around the lawn.  It’s complicated—valves and timers and couplings.  I’m never sure which of it works and which has failed, so I don’t throw it away.  Instead, it gets put into piles that then get moved out of the way, and we buy some more at the Ace Hardware up the street. 

Rocks:  These are rocks that we’ve collected when camping.  We usually find good ones…too good to just leave laying on the ground.  So we bring them home and store them on the fence.  The winter wind in Laramie is strong enough to blow them off the fence, but we pick them up in the spring and put them back where they belong.  Then we go look for more.

Hanging flower baskets:  The idea is to have lovely hanging flowers around the house.  We have some, but some we don’t get around to planting, and then winter comes again.

Woodpile:  When we bought our house, I had a lot more energy for remodeling, so I bought a cord of wood and a stove to keep the garage warm when I was milling trim and upgrading the kitchen.  Now I don’t want to work on the house ever again, so the woodpile is rotting away, sheltering rabbits and mice.  Sometimes I take some for campfires if I remember to pack it into a plastic milk crate before I hit the road. 

Clothesline:  In the summer in Laramie, clothes dry faster on the line than they do in the dryer.  This is true in the dry air of day and even by moonlight.  It seems good to air dry clothes instead of burning natural gas in the dryer, but we don’t have quite enough clothes pins.

Cat platform:  Our current cats (Henry and Psymon) are indoor cats (prisoners).  Our last generation of cats (Ernie and Zopie) could come and go as they pleased, which may have contributed to their demise.  I built this platform to provide them with a place to assess the backyard after they exited their cat door.

Tile mosaic (art):  Bei made this tile mosaic during an art camp in Boulder, Colorado.  We display it in the backyard, behind one of our patio chairs. 

Last light:  The last light of day on our neighbor’s tree.  It’s surprising how often the light at the end of the day in Laramie in the summer is perfectly golden and warm, and it’s surprising how little time the trees have leaves on them to take advantage of it.  When I see the golden light, I feel vaguely guilty that I’m sitting in the backyard instead of driving around to make more dramatic and meaningful photographs.

Cold margarita:  A nice cold margarita (the ice melted) on our patio table.  Just enough of a cocktail to encourage me to blog about stuff on our back patio.