It was 95o this week – in September - and the world is complaining about the heat. Air conditioners are working full time in homes, in offices, in stores, and in automobiles. People now think that they are entitled to be cool – even when it’s hot out side. Such was not always the case.
These
days my ranch foreman, Eric, and I seek shade when the temperatures climb. “Too hot for us Northern Europeans” is my
mantra. But such was not the case in my
younger years.
Fifty years ago
there were two summer jobs that yielded not to temperature: stacking hay, and
shoeing horses.
Both of these
jobs are labor intensive. Hay-stacking requires
slinging hundreds a day of 60-100 pound bales.
Horseshoeing requires crouching beneath an animal, rasping a foot flat
and beating on an iron shoe - with or without a forge. Most of the time a horseshoer can find some
shade; but hay-stacking, by definition, is done in an open field.
In the 1960s,
yet, we often carried to the hayfield a gallon jug covered in burlap sacking to
both insulate and provide some evaporation to lower the temperature from hot,
to merely lukewarm.
In later years,
as home freezers became more common, I always had two jugs in the freezer: one
half full – to which I would then add water – and one frozen clear through. I depended on the constant consumption of
cold water, and the continual evaporation of sweat through my cotton shirt to
keep me cool. Both jugs were usually empty
by the end of a hot day.
In fact, I am
old enough to remember the “Desert Water Bags” that were often seen hanging on
the side of a car in the deserts of the Southwest. These were heavy canvas,
which seeped just enough to keep them damp – cooling the contents with
evaporation. Cars were commonly seen
along the highways with their hoods up, suffering from overheating or a
vapor-lock of the fuel system.
It was in the
60s that I first saw a car with air conditioning, and have never lived in a
home with A/C.
But now every
car and piece of farm equipment has A/C, as do many homes and most commercial buildings.
Rather than working with the heat by drinking water and sweating, we are
now working against it – conditioning ourselves to be entitled to
year-around comfort. And in the
meantime, the hot air is being extracted from our living spaces and dumped out
into the environment.
Likewise, we
are rapidly losing such things as clothes drying on the line, lawns, and hay
fields that once cooled the air around us, and replacing them with clothes
dryers, gravel beds, and parking lots that draw the heat in.
I’m not fully
convinced in the “Global Warming” debate, but I see evidence all around me of
the ‘Folly of Mankind’.
