Yeah, I know this is a couple of days late, but when the heat was at its peak, I didn’t feel like writing about it. It had to get a little cooler first.
A week or two back I was at the beach, and since the Surfside Beach library is constantly getting rid of books, bless them, I picked up some they were selling for about three for a dollar, and one of them was The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. I’d never read it before. For the uninitiated, it’s fiction, but it’s based on (or perhaps I should say it opens with) a real-life attempt to kill Charles De Gaulle. Not one of those lone-gunman things, but a whole team of conspirators who hated him because he had given up control of Algeria. Really, they felt that strongly about it.
Anyway, I just started reading it last night, and was struck by a seemingly mild description of the weather on page 4, reproduced above. Note the key sentence: “Even at 7 in the evening of the hottest day of the year the temperature was still twenty-five degrees centigrade.”
I’ll wait a moment while you look up how “hot” that is in real temperature. When I did that, I learned that 25 degress C is 77 degrees F. I just now glanced at my phone and see that at 8:40 p.m., it’s 85 degrees. And to my memory, this is the nicest day we’ve had this week. I’ve been out working in the yard, and am sitting here typing hoping to cool off a bit before showering. But Parisians were abandoning the city because on Aug. 22, 1962, it was 77 degrees and they couldn’t bear it. “Hottest day of the year.”
Maybe that was one of the fictional parts of the book. I hope so. Otherwise, we must believe one of two things: Human expectations have changed more dramatically than I had thought, because of global warming. Or, we must assume that when a character on the Simpsons called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” he was actually referring to their wimpiness regarding weather.
Alas, it’s likely the former. When we visited Boston in July 2022, it was delightfully cool in the mornings and evenings and nicely warm at midday, and it was even cooler in Amsterdam last summer. So you can still have nice weather, from a South Carolinian’s perspective, if you go way up north.
But a couple of days ago, it was 102 in Beantown. That same day, it was 100 in Philadelphia. (And last night when I started reading that book, my phone told me it was 78 in Paris in the wee hours of the morning. In June. So, way warmer than 1962, although not impressive to us.)
It wasn’t that hot here — 99 yesterday, I believe, and 98 the day before — but it was miserable enough. Inexplicably. My phone weather apps kept saying the “air quality” was fine, but for me, that was a lie. The Post and Courier was more honest than that a couple of days ago.., Of course, being an old newspaperman I may be prejudiced but for me, it’s been like trying to breathe green pea soup for about a week. Last week, I started having the first asthma trouble I’d had in a very long time. I started taking prednisone this week. I hate the side effects, but it’s got me breathing again. Still, I’ve been staying indoors, until today.
Today was nice. Really nice. I haven’t been sleeping much, thanks to the steroid, but when I got up this morning a little after 6, I didn’t mind. I started picking up branches that had fallen all over the yard, and when I found what I thought was a gumball tree that had come crashing down out back (actually, it was just a tree-sized branch of a huge one in my neighbor’s yard), I attacked it with relish. A brush saw, a pole saw, two pairs of loppers and a chainsaw, which I wore out. Had to order a new chain. Filled up the bed of my truck, and there’s enough left to fill it again after I haul it to the recycling center this weekend.
While I was working in the morning, it was about 73, I think. (My phone, to my great disappointment, never tells me was the weather was, it just makes predictions about the future, and doesn’t own up when they turn out to be wrong. Kind of like a lot of political writers.)
I hope you had a good day, too….
Edward Fox was the Jackal in the 1973 movie, which was odd. He’s usually a good guy, right?
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Yesterday I reminded my wife I didn’t have air conditioning until I was 14-15 yrs old. Wife responded she didn’t have air conditioning until we were married!
I remember getting out of bed in the middle of the night and sitting on the front porch to catch a breeze. The big Emerson window fan was in my sisters’ bedroom. Every window in the house was open and screen doors with that little latch was all we had between us and the mean old world. But gee, we made it after all.
Well, we’re grateful you survived, but also aware that a reason that you did is that it wasn’t as hot back then.
Another reason you survived is you probably didn’t have the health problems I had a kid — especially the allergies and asthma. For that reason, although I lived in houses without AC as well as a kid, my parents (and grandparents, when we were staying with them) generally made sure there was a window unit in the room where I slept. It didn’t keep me from having attacks, but it made life a lot easier.
But again, I’m acutely aware that the weather simply wasn’t as hot and miserable then. I played out in it all the time, in this part of the country and also when I lived in the tropics. And sometimes that to me, too. But the bad time, for an asthmatic kid, is at night…