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When did hot get so much hotter?
Summer came in with a toasting this year. According to the official and, presumably, infallible National Weather Service record book, it was a scant three degrees short of 100 while I was out there shoveling dirt, putting down mulch and otherwise liftin’ and totin’ relatively heavy stuff right out there under God’s bright shining sun. The weekend honey-do list just about did me in — and it wasn’t even June yet.
I don’t know, with a fanny-scorching Memorial Day weekend just about coinciding with Al Gore’s debut as a movie star I couldn’t help thinking the planets must be lining up funny, or something of equal cosmic significance is going on. I don’t know what it said about global warming, but the spot of globe along the west side of my house was plain, flat-out hot.
And the disturbing part of it is that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.
Come to think of it — which I did, sprawled under the ceiling fan, next to the air conditioner, with a tall ice water in one hand and a cold Special Ex in the other — I’m not enjoying most hot weather as much as I ought to be, even when I’m not rebuilding planters and up-ending sod.
Remember, I’m the kid who — ever since I read about it in my fourth-grade Weekly Reader — has been rooting for global warming in a big way. My big concern was that those Jurassic-style weather systems wouldn’t blow in until my dust had been blowing in the wind for several decades. If we were going to have coconut palms on the shores of Lake Mil Lacs, I wanted to be around to sip pina coladas in their shade. Sure, come January I’ve got all the Minnesota macho of any born and bred denizen of the frozen wastes — babbling about the virtues of the “dry cold” while I lose all feeling in my toes and the snotcicles grow like fangs on an arctic beast. But, as much pleasure as I’ve gotten watching lesser mortals — folks visiting from southern Iowa or Missouri — quail before an approaching Alberta Clipper, I’ve always preferred sweat to shiver.
Being the owner of an all-too large bathroom mirror, I’m probably more acutely aware than anyone that my physical attraction is enhanced to a far greater degree by a parka than a Speedo — but I’ve never been one to deny comfort for the sake of vanity.
Maybe it’s the result of generation after generation of forebears doing things like floating around in an open boat in a North Atlantic snowstorm looking for places like Iceland that instilled in me an insatiable lust for solar heat and a total lack of interest in dining on seal blubber. A sun-soaked afternoon draws out my reptilian best — though, given a choice, I’d sprawl on a chaise lounge in preference to a flat rock baking in the sun. And if hot was good, hotter was better … at least until not long ago.
I don’t know when or why, but one day it struck me that the weather was just too doggone hot. Nobody pointed out to me that was an odd thought to have — mainly because they were huddled in the shade, rubbing icy soda pop cans across their foreheads scanning the neighborhood for the nearest air conditioned place of public accommodation. Up to that point, it seems everyone thought it too hot but me — I was just joining in the consensus.
I sure felt like part of the consensus last weekend.
Now that a weak cold front has moved through, we’ve had a pleasant shower, and the forecast is for 70s and low 80s as far out as the seers dare see, I’m a little concerned about that. Have I finally repaid those generations
of Nordic heat debt and can now sweat and suffer like normal people? Or has that old Weekly Reader forecast been put into fast-forward and Lake of the Woods is on the verge of becoming a tropical lagoon? And I’m finding out equatorial life isn’t as hot as a boy in a November classroom made it out to be?
Maybe Al Gore’s movie has something to say about that — at least the theater’s air-conditioned.
It might finally be hot enough for me — I’m not sure I like that.
Not sure at all.
Contact Jerome Christenson at jchristenson@winonadaily news.com or 453-3522.
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