This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
When recently I heard the weather forecast calling for several days of “good sleeping weather,” I was pleasantly surprised and a bit nostalgic, having not heard in years the once-familiar term, now relegated to memory of a distant time and no longer familiar place.
When summer heat failed to conjure up any premonition of the doom it does today, movie theaters provided the only mechanized cool available, “The Attack of the Crab Monsters” or “The Blob” offered IQ-lowering distractions while chilling out. Times were simpler and so were we. No implications. It was just hot.
While open windows may have facilitated listening to one or another baseball game from any porch in the neighborhood, they did very little to cool off interiors, which in many cases were stifling.
We lived on the top floor of a three-story walkup in those days and, come August, everything became more difficult and some things nearly impossible, like sleeping. We were several years from air conditioners becoming prevalent. At this point — at least in our house — an air conditioner was considered an unnecessary luxury item.
We, like everyone else, eventually got one, unaware that in the distant future these ubiquitous cooling devices would provide both comfort and misery in equal measure, ironically the progenitor of their own necessity. The hotter it got, the more ACs we bought; the more of them we bought, the hotter it got and the more of them we needed.
Air conditioners are a prime factor in the heat that requires a proliferation of air conditioners not only to keep us comfortable, but, in an increasing number of locations, it has become essential in keeping us alive.
While we vigorously debate the environmental impact of every vehicle, home appliance, power source and personal habit, air conditioning has largely escaped much scrutiny, likely because for a huge portion of the country, living without is an impossible concept. Although, up until 1960, 80 percent of Southern homes did just that, getting by with thicker walls, wraparound porches and better air circulation, which many architects at the turn of the 20th century agreed was essential to summertime relief.
But those living in cities, without the opportunity to renovate either low-rent tenements or even upscale brownstones, urbanites faced different circumstances, requiring creative solutions. In “Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything,” author Salvatore Basile outlined some strategies city dwellers used to beat the heat. “A lot of people would head for the roofs of their buildings, trying to get some sleep,” while the upper class — for whom it was fashionable to ignore the heat — “the idea was that you were immune to temperature. You simply did not acknowledge that it was hot.”
New Yorkers for whom self-delusion provided little in the way of mitigation took to open fire hydrants and crowded city beaches during the day or fire escapes and even Central Park when the sun went down. During a heat wave in the mid-1930s, the Brooklyn Eagle reported 15,000 “spent last night on the beach at Coney Island and several thousand more sought relief in Brooklyn parks and playgrounds,” with many sleeping “on rooftops and fire escapes in crowded sections of Brooklyn,” while in Manhattan, “the grass in Central Park and the piers on the East River” became open-air bedrooms.
Entrepreneurial experiments with climate control began as far back as the turn of the 20th century with the cold air stove, or NEVO (oven spelled backwards), essentially an ice cream freezer attached to a fan — a big ice cream freezer requiring 200 pounds of ice daily, which was impractical, to say the least. Several decades later, Frigidaire developed what it called a “room cooler,” which weighed in at 200 pounds, requiring a separate 400-pound compressor and (in today’s money) $11,000 of cold, hard cash. Neither device took the country by storm.
I don’t recall precisely when we acquired our first air conditioner but it was nestled in the kitchen window of my mom’s apartment when I got back from four years in the military in early 1970, and viola! We no longer needed to rely on weather’s beneficence for a decent night’s sleep.
Before very long, the Northeast’s twin demons of heat and humidity inched upward, making mechanical cooling standard equipment in both homes and cars, except my ride, a VW Bug in which the vent windows fully turned backward provided ventilation. This system worked only when the car was moving. Red lights and city traffic became serious threats to my well-being each summer.
In retrospect, the irony of that time is that, while we sweltered, other folks were migrating south to Florida or the southwest toward Arizona, lured from the discomfort of gray, slushy winter by the siren song of sunny skies and warmer temperatures.
As the populations of those areas swelled from relocated snowbirds turned permanent residents, the selling point of moderate winters has been more than balanced out by summers bordering on unsurvivable.
After the hottest July on record for the planet, temperatures in the 120-degree range became commonplace in the desert Southwest, as did decades-long droughts and unprecedented wildfires burning millions of acres. Back East, hurricanes have been slamming the Southern coast with more strength and frequency than ever before. Last weekend, even New England was threatened when Henri made landfall in Rhode Island as a tropical storm after being downgraded from what would have been the first hurricane in three decades to directly hit the region.
Unprecedented summer conditions here in Vermont have breached strongholds where non-mechanized “good sleeping weather” has been a given since the Jurassic, prompting talk of air conditioning in hushed, conspiratorial whispers: “I thought I could get by with fans, but those damned south-facing windows.”
I’ve even thought about it myself, but we’re near enough to see hints of autumn in the long-range forecast, which will suffice for now. There’s always next year.
