Thus began our stay in Yuma. And my fascination with heat heretofore unimaginable. That strange third digit morning after morning on the front page of Yuma’s daily paper. The prefix “one hundred and” uttered day after peculiar day by television meteorologists. Heat that required running the cold-water tap for five minutes before getting a warm drink. Heat that could fry an egg or possibly even grill bacon―or at least zap its trichinella―on a rail of the Union Pacific track not far from our house.
On fiery July afternoons, our neighborhood was effectively deserted, disturbed only by a fleeting breeze, the flight of a dove, the rasp and whisper of palm leaves, the shadow of a vulture, the distant roar of a freight train. Meanwhile, the chief activity in Yuma’s ubiquitous RV “resorts”─the city’s cumulative golden goose during the fall and winter─was the mere drift of sand.
Then, at sunset, like the rattlesnakes, pocket mice, kit foxes, and solpugids in the surrounding desert, our year-round human neighbors―some of them, at least―emerged from their dens and commenced to walk, run, bicycle, play hopscotch and kickball, water flowers and shrubs, and reconnect.
Yes, the summer heat in Yuma was ferocious, and I quickly learned you trifle with it at your peril. Intrigued by the recently dedicated Yuma East Wetlands public park adjacent to the Colorado River―like the Rio Grande through Alamosa, languid through this stretch of Arizona―I set out one sunny noon on its two-and-a-half-mile loop trail, thinking the quart of water in my daypack would be sufficient.
A half-mile into the trail I was puzzled by the lack of people. After all, the temperature was a mere 100. At what I presumed was the trail’s midpoint, I slumped in some scant shade beside a bone-dry concrete irrigation ditch.
And began to panic. My water was nearly gone, and I felt the desert beginning to sit on my chest. I resumed, although now somewhat wobbling upon the trail. Passing a swamp filled with a dark, stagnant, repellant broth, I noticed my thoughts beginning to slur. At one point, buried amid the park’s trees and shrubs and confused by the trail’s signage, I wondered if I was going around in circles―or going mad.
I was neither. I finally made it to Gateway Park, my starting point. There, I thrust my head under a blessed outdoor shower likely installed for bathers in the nearby Colorado. I pictured clouds of steam issuing from my head. Never did water─river water, I presumed, so I avoided drinking it─feel so good. I would have stepped completely under the shower─jeans, shirt, hiking boots, daypack, wristwatch, everything─but a family with small children was picnicking nearby and I feared alarming them with such pixilation.
Somewhat relieved, I dragged myself another quarter mile to the Yuma Visitor Center, where I rehydrated, gulping two quarts of water as I slumped on a vinyl sofa, grateful to be alive.
And yet, adequately hydrated, I didn’t mind Yuma’s extraordinary heat. I even liked it. At nine percent relative humidity, a temperature of 104 could be, in Edward Abbey’s words, “comfortable, even pleasant.”
July and August days, dressed in athletic shorts, a sleeveless polyester shirt, and sandals, with only household errands to perform, I deliberately drove around Yuma with my truck’s windows wide open and its air-conditioning off, fancying myself one of Frank Waters’s “psychical mestizos”: men “European on the outside and Indian inside, men neither white nor wholly red.” Rather than continually battling the heat, I sought to engage it on its own terms, the way people did for thousands of years before refrigerated air was introduced to the Southwest around 1950. As in Anthony, I found such heat soothing, cleansing, purifying.
Of course, I also acknowledged that such heat could be exhausting. I thought of the Yumans who had to toil day after day in it: the farmworkers and landscapers, the people who maintained the ditches and swimming pools, that remarkable─or pixilated─person who wore the full panda suit while hawking some business on 4th Avenue at midday.
Yet, as much as I liked to toot my own horn about my ability to contend with extreme heat, I couldn’t have lived in the hot desert without some kind of home refrigeration, be it air-conditioning or evaporative cooling.
I became especially aware of this in Yuma, when our dwelling’s air-conditioner failed on the cusp of the Labor Day weekend, when the temperatures were, of course, still in the 100’s. As a consequence, Linda retreated to a motel room while the dogs and I set up camp in our north-facing living room―as if such global positioning would have made any difference―with a ceiling fan spinning madly above and two floor fans blasting air from opposite sides.
Our management company said it was unlikely a repairman could be found over the Labor Day weekend. (Probable translation: “We’ll be damned if we’re going to pay triple the cost just so you can enjoy the holiday.”) But, to my surprise, after two days and two nights of the North African sirocco in our living room, a repairman showed up on Labor Day itself and spent four hours in the blaze on our roof installing a new compressor, which he had to pick up in Phoenix the previous day. I tipped him $50 when the job was done and went out for a Big Mac and large fries.
MY SOUTHWEST by Philip Davis 