RIVER CITY JOURNAL: LESSONS FROM THE HAYVIELD ON A HOT SUMMER DAY

* There are simple ways to beat the heat, but we prefer to live inside huge refrigerators.

I've been thinking a lot about hot weather recently. Maybe you have too.

In case you haven't figured it out, having air-conditioned homes, offices, cars, stores, restaurants and movie theaters makes the heat worse.

Bear with me on this one.

Before air conditioning, hot weather was called summer. Now we call it a nuisance that requires expensive mechanical relief.

Some summers before air conditioning, as I recall, were hotter and drier. Others were cooler and wetter. That's all. Then fall came, and it was cool again. Pretty simple.

In those days of open windows in August and electric fans, people were a lot smarter. I'm convinced of it. Being cool all the time addles the brain and makes you do silly things.

For example: I was in a restaurant the other day, and a woman came in carrying a sweater. "I'm always cold when we go out to eat," I heard her say. "It's a good thing I remembered my sweater."

Outside, the August sun had gone down, but the temperature at dusk was a steamy 91 degrees.

Inside the restaurant, it was cold enough for penguins to do a floor show.

Maybe the woman with the sweater had a point.

Before air conditioning, we didn't have anything to compare the summer heat to, except for the refrigerated air at Toney's Drug Store on Main Street in my favorite hometown, and even if you sat in one of Toney's booths all Saturday afternoon and drank chocolate malts, by Sunday afternoon you had forgotten how cool it was.

At home, heat was everywhere. When you really noticed the temperature was when you went to bed. At night, the breeze stops.

An oscillating fan was the ticket, one of those fans that swung back and forth, back and forth. You would lie in bed anticipating the soft rush of air over your skin. As soon as you felt the effects of the fan, the blades would shift another direction, and you would wait, counting off the seconds until it was your turn to have the moving air on your side of the bed again.

You know what? I can only remember counting two or three cycles of the fan swinging from one side to the other. By the fourth pass, I'd be sound asleep.

Now, with air conditioning and white noise, I find it difficult to drift off. Perhaps I'm waiting for the fan to swing my way one more time.

My aunt's step-father-in-law, Dude, used to beat the heat when he was helping us haul hay on Kelo Valley by drinking cup after cup of steaming hot coffee. Between loads, the rest of us would head to the outdoor faucet that gushed deep-well water full of lime, surprisingly cold even in July and August. But Dude would be filling his cup in the farmhouse kitchen with another cup of coffee while he tipped the old felt fedora he wore everywhere further back on his head his only concession to taking a break.

Dude had it figured out. He said being hot is relative to everything else. Let's say the barn was stacked to the rafters with big blocks of ice cut from the pond out back, he'd say. It would be mighty chilly in the hayloft, even in August, Dude would speculate. And every time you came down from the loft, you would feel the blast of heat from an ordinary August day.

But if you take a few swigs of scalding coffee, Dude would carefully explain, your insides get all heated up. And when you step back into the full sun of a dusty, stubble-strewn hayfield feeling hot on the inside, the air around you actually feels cool.

"Try it," he would say.

Naturally, I was too young to drink scalding black coffee. The only coffee I can get down to this day is about half milk and half sugar, and it is never hotter than room temperature by the time I swallow it. No, according to Dude's theory, that wouldn't work. Wouldn't work at all.

But Dude was right. Except air conditioning has taken us to the other extreme. Instead of coffee that gives off steam even on the hottest day of the year, we have taken the Popsicle approach. We try to get our insides ice cold.

And then we step outside.

If he were still around, Dude would just laugh and laugh at us.

And reach for another mug of percolated coffee so hot you could boil an egg.

Boy, it's hot outside. Have you noticed?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.