Hate the Heat

I’ve never understood the concept of four seasons. They are a myth. A slight chunk of world experiences them. Where I live, we have summer and not quite summer anymore and then two weeks of something colder than you can wear a T-shirt in. That third thing is not a season. It’s a splinter of a shiver. A glimpse at something foreign.

I’ve moved many times in my life. My father was a minister, and he was always getting bigger churches, until he didn’t get churches anymore. Most of my life has been lived in Texas. I’ve spent nine months away. In Vermont. From April to December. I moved away in a blizzard, packing my things in a U-Haul as snow flicked my nose and tongue, my feet slipping on iced stairs as I hoisted furniture aloft uneasily. That day, it was two degrees. Your breath froze into the forms of animals that begat more animals, and the generations danced away into the grayness of sky. But I wasn’t all that uncomfortable. In fact, the work was refreshing.

Yesterday my wife and I loaded a U-Haul in South Texas. We were 15 miles from the Mexican border. The sun was a psychotic pederast leering down on us. Its brilliance and consistency despicable. Its presence so permanent and fixed upon us that we wished it turned black and fell into the ocean, sucked the world away in a whirlpool of mutilation. The heat index was 111 degrees.

I hate the putrid summer. I think of it as a sickness that flickers the souls from children and catalogs them as antiquated things under the stillness of conditioned air, presenting them as specimens enshrined by the glass of residential-dwelling windows.

Albert Camus writes of this brand of heat well:

[T]he sun bakes the houses bone-dry, sprinkles our walls with grayish dust, and you have no option but to survive those days of fire indoors, behind closed shutters.

I’d much prefer to freeze. Heat is a passive poison. It drains you so slow. The cold has the decency to destroy you in a blunt shot of “see you later.”

Of course, Jack London paints this style of demise the prettiest:

After a time he was aware of the first faraway signals of sensation in his beaten fingers. The faint tingling grew stronger till it evolved into a stinging ache that was excruciating, but which the man hailed with satisfaction . . . He beat his hands, but failed in exciting any sensation . . . The withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now made him begin to shiver, and he grew more awkward . . . His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when he discovered that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend nor feeling in the fingers. He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more . . . The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.

In his book The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea gives the heat version of London’s “To Build a Fire,” and the actions presented are far more humiliating than merely attempting to kill a dog.

You piss in your hands, or in whatever container you might have. You try not to dribble a single drop, and you lament all the priceless piss wasted on the desert floor. You hold your breath and forget about the taboos and you gulp your own hot mess. And you piss into your hands again until it’s gone. You’re alive! You’ve beaten death with your own water.

I hate the heat. I want to stab it in the face. In a few moments, I’ll track back into it. Into the sunshine like a liquor you can’t stand another swallow of. A wretch-inducing evil insect of a sensation. Why? I have to unload. Retrace my steps in reverse. In the same heat that only yesterday I promised myself I’d never endure again. But even then, I knew it was a lie. It’s the only season I know for certain, which makes me think: perhaps I’m in hell.