Nights are nice.
I've always said that Yuma, Arizona, is the hottest place I've ever been, and this morning the news said that Yuma was the hottest place in the country yesterday at 110°, which broke all kinds of records for March.
I dug my floor fan out of the camper, where I keep things stored that I don't use very often, and set it up to blow air on me while I'm sitting at the table. It had been so long since I used it that I forgot I had it. Having the air moving helps a little, but the only air it's blowing around is hot, so it's still not all that great.
It's way too hot to go outside, and even moving around inside the camper in the afternoon is physically draining, so anything I can't do before 9 AM doesn't get done. And the only reason I can stand this at all is that the humidity is in the single digits and it's getting down into the sixties at night, so everything cools off rather nicely, and so typical for the desert, it’s cool enough in the morning to wear a jacket.
Giving this whole situation some thought, I've realized that the only thing that's different about this heat is it's happening in March instead of July; other than that, these temperatures would be perfectly normal for the Phoenix area. So back in the day, the people who lived around Phoenix would have to deal with these temperatures with no air conditioning, no refrigerators in the kitchen, and working hard outdoor jobs. And the only thing that saved them from dying in this heat is......
1.... The houses were built for this environment. Back in the day, a lot of homes were built out of adobe, and those mud brick walls were very good insulation, so they would hold in the nighttime cool air and keep out the heat in the daytime. But that doesn't really help me because all I can do is open all the windows.
2... They were used to these temperatures. This helps more than anything, but acclimatization takes time, and a whole lot of people mentioned in number 3.
3.… They were tough people. This explains more than anything else: there were no whiners living in Arizona back in the day. Before air conditioning and cold beer came along, very few folks other than various Indian tribes could live in this godforsaken desert.
So what am I going to do? I'll take a stab at writing about that tomorrow.
Theboondork
This is one of the many places I won't be walking anymore for fear of stepping on a single slithering sneaky snake. I have not seen a single snake since this heat wave started, but I do know that rattlesnakes love the heat, so I figure, why take the chance?
A quiet place to boondock.… We boondockers are a hardy lot; we have to be, life is challenging, and the life of a boondocker, even more so. But there's a big upside. Being a boondocker allows you to be in charge of your own life.
Mucho Saguaro. But the challenges are worth it just to be able to stay in places like this without being awning to awning with a hundred neighbors, their barking dogs, their loud music. And their drunken late-night arguments.