How Hot Was It?

Laredo has always been hot in the summer. In my 1950s and 60s childhood, afternoon temperatures hit 100° around Cinco de Mayo and stayed there until long after Nuevo Laredo’s Grito de Independencia Feria. They still do.

Summer afternoons on my way over to Chester Long’s house barefoot, I’d do my best Border Olympics triple jumps to get across the burning asphalt of Milmo Avenue. The street was so hot your feet could only stand a couple of steps before they burned. You could walk on the concrete curbs, though, because their light color didn’t absorb as much heat. The black asphalt was always another, hotter level of the Inferno, and I hadn’t done a firewalk training.

On a good afternoon, I could make it across the street in three leaping strides. That was after I figured out the geometry of intersecting parallel lines. If the sides of the street were the parallel lines, the shortest line across the two of them was a perpendicular one, and any path across at an angle was longer.

When I studied geometry years later at Nixon High with an inspiring teacher, Adriana Barrera, I already understood the idea of the parallel lines theorem, even though I couldn’t demonstrate its logical proof. My non-theoretical feet had been inspirational teachers, too, even though they only did empirical proofs.

Sure, it would have been easier to wear shoes, but I wasn’t in the habit of wearing them when school was out, except for baseball games and church.

El llorasangres lies still in the hot sand, in plain sight but hidden from view.

Barefoot, you had to watch out for tar patches in the street. By three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun would have brought the tar up to melting temperature. If you stepped in it, there’d be a patch of black, scalding goo stuck to the sole of your bare foot until you managed to get it off. When you saw a friend hopping around on a lawn near the street madly scraping his foot on the grass, you knew he’d not been aguza’o and stepped in the molten tar.

Three o’clock was an important time every summer day. That was when my mom would let me go outside and release me from two hours of enforced boredom indoors following lunch.

She was right. Before three, you could get too hot playing out there under that sun.

In the summer of 1961, my Yankees teammate, Johnny Snyder, had a part-time job with Mr. Gilliland’s real estate company watering the new lawns in a housing development over by Calton Road. One afternoon he forgot to wear his hat to the job site. Even though he had the protection of that bright head of reflective, platinum-blond hair, in honor of which the poet José Luis Gámez gave him the nickname, “Espejo,” Johnny got dizzy and started hallucinating standing there in the sun. He had to stay overnight at Mercy Hospital to be treated for heatstroke.

The spiraled diamondback dozes on a rock in the sun.

True refrigerated air conditioning had been invented by Mr. Carrier in upstate New York fifty years earlier, but during the 1950s and early 60s Laredo still had very few thermostats. One of the popular early air conditioned spaces was the lobby of the Hamilton Hotel. How many of us cut through just to cool off? Coming from downtown,
you’d go in on Matamoros under the watchful eye of Police Officer “Pete” Vargas, walk up the inclined hall past the barbershop, pass the magazine, tobacco, and candy stand, and exit through the door on the left to Salinas. A minute and a half of relief from the hot air out in the Laredo streets.

People laugh at the foolish geezer’s too-often retold story about walking miles to school in the snow. My young story-victims have laughed at me in my garrulous senility with rolling eyes and uh-huh faces for forgetful repetitions of how I folded pages of loose-leaf paper lengthwise to place under my right forearm as I wrote out school work at Lamar. (I had to. If not, the sweat from my arm would have left the paper under it so wet that it would have blotted the ink of my pen.) Some Septembers and Mays even boys abandoned the delicate code of masculine decorum, and we waved accordion-fold fans at our faces in class like the girls — and Spanish flamenco dancers.

Les Norton, who had, while we were still in elementary school, precociously offered to help me place bets through his ‘contacts’ on N.F.L. games, once invented a uniquely Laredo gambling scheme. “Vegas” Les created a pool in which you could buy the date on the April or May calendar when you guessed the first day over-100° would be recorded. At 25¢ a day, you might win the large sum of three or four dollars, if you’d bought the day closest to the right date. However, like other rackets involving at-risk allowance money, the pool failed to generate sufficient interest to ever make a Lamar seventh-grader rich. It may well have been a conceptual flaw in the scheme since the first 100° day was just as likely to come in February or March, making too many possible winning days.

La chicharra stays cool underground for seventeen years before hatching in a plague, waiting for the praying mantis to forget what good food it is.

The summer heat created business opportunities for my father and the Yeary’s. A now long-forgotten enterprise in Tyler used to manufacture patented clip-on, perforated aluminum screens that you fastened inside your car’s windows to keep out the sun. The perforations were horizontal, and the thin metal was bent at an angle like Venetian blinds, so you could see out, but the sun’s rays, falling as they did from a higher angle, were reflected off the shades’ silver exterior side. Lots of people who could afford newer cars had them, but the solar screens were dangerous for everyone who was still driving an older car. In those modest vehicles, with screens clipped in place, but without electric turn signals, you wouldn’t be able to get your left arm out the window to indicate where you were turning. But then, now that I think about it, not that many Laredo drivers ever bothered to signal their turns anyway. Sudden turns with no signal has ever been the way of Laredo drivers.

Another automotive after-market product of those days was a detachable evaporative cooler you could hang out the car window to blow in cooler air. The contraption was a tube shaped like a two-foot-long jet engine, with spinning rotors at the open forward intake end, and a rectangular opening on the side for the air cooled by evaporation to circulate into the car. (If you’ve never seen one or can’t remember what these were just Google “vintage automobile swamp cooler.”) Because they had no motor to circulate the air, these gadgets only worked on the highway, where you could drive the car fast enough to force air through them.

That add-on was a particular favorite of all us boys in the neighborhood. For our money, they made a boring old Ford or Chevy family sedan look like a jet plane. We imagined it would be cool if someone put one of these mock engines on both sides of the car and painted a US aircraft insignia on the doors. A vision of a weaponized automobile right out of Science Fiction Magazine, and cool inside, to boot!

El zopilote conserves energy, in effortless gliding circles on the rising thermals.

By the mid-60’s most American automobiles were coming from the factory with what we now consider air conditioning as standard equipment. When I worked in 115º heat under the service department’s corrugated roof, Yeary’s kept two mechanics, Joe and Nicho, busy five-and-a-half days a week maintaining cars’ air conditioning systems. I helped them pump gallons of refrigerant into customers’ cars to replace all the Freon™ that had escaped into the atmosphere from leaky pumps and hoses. You couldn’t just pour the Freon™ in the pressurized systems. The car’s engine had to be running with the air conditioner on to draw the refrigerant gas out of the bottles. Those running engines did nothing to cool the garage area where we worked on those hot afternoon. Driving home on Corpus Christi Street after five o’clock and hearing KTSA play the Lovin’ Spoonful singing about “Hot town, summer in the city!” and “walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head,” I’m thinking “yeah, but how ‘bout summer in Laredo?”

It was innocent enough. No one knew that by helping customers drive in air-conditioned comfort from one side of Laredo to another, all those nasty chlorofluorocarbons we used were helping create the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica.

Los tlacuaches stay cool all day under the floor of the workshop. 

The house on Garfield where I grew up had been built in 1951 in the tract-house style typical of the time with no provision for hot weather other than sash windows in every room. For cold weather, there was a small, wall-mounted gas heater in the bathroom and a free-standing gas heater in the opening of a faux-hearth with a mantel above. We may have lit the heaters four or five times in the sixteen years I lived there. The one time it actually got below freezing, my mom lighted the gas oven, turned it on full blast, and opened the oven door. The house was warm, but all the cool glass in the windows of the little house were fogged over with the condensed water vapor.

La hormiga león waits patiently at the cool bottom of a little funnel trap of sand for a careless ant to tumble in. 

The lack of cooling was an uncomfortable problem in a new neighborhood like ours that had no trees to shade the houses. Older neighborhoods like Fort McIntosh, El Cuatro between the train station and downtown, and along and south of the old Market Street neighborhood had large trees and palms that shaded houses and streets. The turn-of-the-century houses there were built to accommodate the summer heat. They had high ceilings, huge windows, and screened sleeping porches. But at my house, before the trees had grown up, the small houses with dirt yards just baked there in a dusty solar oven. Opening the windows to catch the draft from the blast furnace outside offered no relief, so the blinds on the east, south, and west elevations were kept drawn tight.

It was just hot. And so were we.

Dogs are clever about keeping cool in the heat. You can see them slow things way down during the dog-days of la canícula. My mother would never allow my pet dog Spot in the house, so he lived out in the back yard. It was always easy to find him out there on a hot summer afternoon. He’d be sprawled in front of one of the screened crawlspace vents with his belly catching the slightly cooler air wafting through from the darkness under the house. It was a good place to scratch his ears and conjecture about the meaning of the universe — or anything else an eight-year-old boy might contemplate on a summer afternoon.

El sapo hides his ugly face deep in the ground, waiting to sing his love song in a rain’s brief charco.

Spot had another alternative to air conditioning, one that he shared with others of his species living in hot climates, but one equally appreciated by the beagle across the street named Duke. My mother kept colorful flowerbeds with zinnias, Bells-of-Ireland, petunias, cosmos, and lantana in bloom through August only by daily irrigation. Which was one of my least favorite chores. I just never saw the point of wasting precious time I might have dedicated to self-improvement projects like reading comics or studying the statistics on the backs of my baseball cards. No escape from duty: I had to endure the mind-numbing monotony of standing there with the garden hose splashing lifesaving water on my mother’s desperate flowers.

Spot and Duke were both repeat offender garden diggers. On hot days, they would dig out little troughs in the wet soil of the flower beds, perform the familiar dog ritual of treading in a circle, and snuggle in with a grunt. Unlike the dry soil of uncultivated areas, the earth they uncovered in the flower beds was an effective heat sink. Then they would cast their eyes up at me with that stupid look of contentment.

This sort of garden spoiling met with the strongest disapproval from my mother, and the sluggish, sullen dogs were duly chased out of their emergency shelters with terrible threats. Their canine intuition helped both dogs recognize that I was a neutral party in their territorial dispute with mom, and they were both careful to curb their instinct to dig scars in the flower gardens front and back to the times when I was on duty. 

The Junebug rests up among the roots under the lawn all day, preparing for the evening dance around the incandescent light bulb on the front porch.

The civilized aesthetics of flower gardens mattered little to me at the barbaric age of eight, and once I, too, committed a crime against their art. One afternoon, having watched Spot enjoy a refreshing cool-down in one of his digs, it occurred to me to try it myself. Even I knew that the flower beds in bloom were not an option, but there was just then a new vacant bed. A trowel made short work of getting down to the cool earth, even though my heat sink needed to be three times the size of Spot’s.

Too bad I’d failed to notice that my parents had planted seeds for a new crop of zinnias the day before in that precise spot, and my experiment spoiled their horticultural vision. Add to that the muddy clothes, and you’ll understand why the punishment was swift and painful.

El maguey stores emergency water for a drought in its aguamiel. 

Time passed, and by the mid-50’s my parents could afford an evaporative cooler. That contraption kept me cool indoors through the rest of my Laredo childhood.

In Arizona, where these coolers were developed and manufactured by the Goettl Brothers, they had the half-colorful, half-aspirational nickname, “swamp coolers.” The zero-percent humidity of the desert air in Phoenix, like Laredo’s, meant that water evaporation produced noticeable cooling effects. Summers in Laredo, the same effect from our perspiration evaporating into the bone-dry air lowered body temperatures and kept us from overheating.

And made us thirsty all day long.

That effect also explains why the 1961 Yankees’ red baseball caps all had chalky mineral stains on their bills and crowns where our sweaty foreheads kept them wet every afternoon. Stuart Temple told me that if you licked the hat where it had been stained white, you could taste salt. He was right. It did.

The green and silver six-striped racer lizard has a breakfast of insects early, then retreats into the shade.

I was dismayed during summer trips to my grandparents’ houses in Port Arthur to discover that it was no use trying to cool off by sweating. The humidity on the Gulf Coast was so high, sweat didn’t bother to evaporate. Compared to the 95º and 95% relative humidity by Lake Sabine, Laredo’s dry 105º was quite comfortable. But then, that was the only climate I knew. I was used to it.

Our house’s evaporative cooler was typical: a large, three-foot cube, with a metal frame, mounted on a wood stand just outside one of bedroom windows. The bottom of the unit was a solid metal basin that held four inches of water, and three of the sides were covered by louvered shutters. Just inside the shutters, thick pads of alder shavings like excelsior were held in place by clips. An electric sump pump in the unit’s basin below pumped a stream of water up to the top of the pads and dripped it down on them. There was an electric motor that powered a squirrel-cage fan in the center of the cube that sucked air from outside in through the damp pads where evaporation cooled the air and pushed it out into the house. One of my daily chores was to go out and refill the basin with water from the garden hose.

The damp breeze was thirty-five degrees cooler than the 107° outside. The cool draft blew all the way through the house and out the screened back door. You could stand of front of the cooler, cross your arms across your chest, and hold a sheet as a cape by the shoulders. The draft was strong enough to push the cape out at an almost horizontal angle behind you. Like Superman. Sure, there was the occasional mold bloom on the wall of my room, and the metal screen on the back door was usually rusted from the moisture blowing through it.

But it was cooler.

We never ran the evaporative cooler at night. Its sub-70° draft would have given me pneumonia or frostbite.

When the brand-new buildings of Nixon High opened in September, 1964, classrooms were all air conditioned. No more sweat blotters under forearms. No paper fans. But none of the windows could be opened either.

In 1969, at the high-point of one of Laredo’s commercial booms, my parents bought a brand-new house on the north side of town. Of course, it had a built-in heating and air conditioning system. That marked the end of the hot old days for the Clouse’s.

El coyote wastes no energy in the heat of the day, napping in the mesquite’s small shade.

We are all used to 72º, air-conditioned indoor spaces everywhere now.

Sixty years ago, most people in Laredo weren’t, and like the life forms we shared the environment with, we figured out how to survive in the extreme heat on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

The Coahuiltecans and all the unnamed tribes of Native Americans who lived here for the ten thousand years before us adapted to the climate.

So did the three founding families of Laredo who settled just downriver from the Paso de los indios with don Tomás Sánchez in 1755. As did their proud descendants who live there today.

If you are of a certain age, you remember getting by in the Laredo heat, too.

We now understand more of the consequences of our manipulation of the earth’s resources.

Is it possible to ask this question: was it better back when we had little choice but to follow the survival skills of the horny toad, rattlesnake, locust, possum, dog, ant-lion, maguey, and coyote?

Or: was it better the way we lived in the olden days of our youth before we air-conditioned everywhere?

You may answer, “Yes, but only as nostalgia.”

You might also think, “Yes. Minimally wasteful, energy-saving, adaptive, low-tech solutions worked just fine.”

Or not.

Whatever you think about dealing with the heat, you probably agree that hot as it was, it was a gift to be a child growing up outdoors in Laredo before the air conditioning revolution.

In the heat, yes, but as free children, unconfined to the energy-squandering, artificially cool comfort of a refrigerated cell.

I know…

You’re thinking, “Easy for you to say, Danny. You live where it never gets over 84º!”