Phoenix 101: Summer

The Sun Worshiper at Park Central mall in Midtown Phoenix, circa 1960. 

Summertime, and the livin' is easy," Gershwin wrote. I never understood that. Movies and television shows with children scampered through meadows in the noonday summer sun similarly baffled me. I was a Phoenician. Summer was the oven. It was a force that demanded respect. Summer could kill you.

We might have ridden bicycles without helmets and freely roamed our neighborhoods without "play dates," but we were also expert in desert survival. So in summertime the livin' was careful. My friends and I avoided going out in mid-day and paced our roams in high summer. I read so many books in a soothingly dim, air-conditioned room at home, or at the public library, where the blast of heat was only apparent if you came close to the windows.

The rhythm of the city changed, slowed down. Aside from the morning and evening rush hour, most people stayed off the streets. Mailmen wore pith helmets. Street work and construction was mostly done early in the morning or not at all. Bank signs flashed triple-digit temperature readings.

Summer did have its charms. For example, most of the snowbirds and tourists — the ones who would ask you where they could find a good "Spanish" restaurant — were gone. It was just us desert rats. The cold-water fountains at every gas station were heaven. Enough money to buy a milkshake or ice-cream cone at one of the drug-store fountains was a cloud above that.

If you were lucky enough to know someone with a pool, someone in Palmcroft, you enjoyed serious relief. Otherwise, there was the crowded municipal pool at Encanto Park. After the sun went down, we ventured outside for more extended periods as the city cooled off. And it did rather dramatically, being surrounded by citrus and other agriculture. The central neighborhoods were also lush with shade trees and grass.

When we lived in the 700 block of Culver, we had an evaporative cooler. I still remember sitting in the back room with that cooler watching the monsoons. The storms were enchanting and terrifying. I was five at the most and remember the rain, thunder booms and white veins of lighning in the sky as if they were yesterday. When we moved to the 300 block of Cypress, the epiphany was central air. (We were too broke to have air conditioning that worked in the car).

That was growing up in the 1960s. I didn't know anything about summers elsewhere. All I knew was the oven. And to be clear: It ran from late May through about the first two weeks in September, then things cooled off. Our school was un-air-conditioned and it was pleasant with the big windows open. Escape came from my Boy Scout troop, which made several weekend camping trips to the High Country during June, July and August. There was also the annual week spent at Camp Geronimo. These were blessed relief. And the country was so wild and empty. I can't remember a major forest fire, certainly not one that threatened a town. I longed to go to college at Northern Arizona University, if for no other reason than to escape the heat (and see the trains). That's just it: I am a Phoenician, but I always disliked the heat. And this was before the temp went up ten degrees in my lifetime.

I spent much time swimming. One summer in high school, I served as a life guard at the Scottsdale YMCA. No beauties needed rescuing — or even smiled at me. I did achieve an astonishing tan and my dark-brown hair started to go blond. It happened even though I sat under an umbrella. Big Surf had opened in 1969, the first "wave pool," and did a brisk business all day.

After high school, my job as a paramedic forced me out in some of the worst heat; it was there that I learned about the second-degree burns that asphalt and concrete can inflict on uncovered skin. Summers brought out the worst in people; short tempers, quick killings. For us, going from cool-to-cold quarters and emergency rooms into triple-digits outside, over and over, it was a constant battle against heat exhaustion. By then, the late-1970s, the city had grown substantially and the old desert-town siesta feel was going...but not quite gone.

The summers, however, seemed more severe. Indeed, the overnight low temperatures have risen at least 10 degrees in my lifetime as the concrete and asphalt of sprawl, the footprint of 4 million people, have replaced agriculture and desert. The monsoons, one of the magic charms of summer in the Sonoran Desert, have changed. When I was a child, they always swept across central Phoenix with spectacular lightning and healing rain. Starting in the late 1970s, they were more likely to hover outside the city. When they came in, the result was often violent. By the 2000s, this has come to include microbusts, one of which leveled telephones and trees and ripped off roofs in Willo. This is unprecedented — and unremarked upon in the media.

The national media have discovered the majesty of a Western dust storm, sometimes rising as high as 10,000 feet as it envelopes the city. This is not new, however much the outlanders want to say "haboob." More of the metropolitan area is experiencing it because the inhabited areas have expanded so dramatically and Phoenix lacks the protective band of citrus groves and farms. Less rain seems to be following the dust. And whether the dust storms are gaining in severity because of climate change deserves more research.

At least we have the god of air conditioning, without which Phoenix would never have grown beyond 50,000 people, if that.

Here is Helen Seargeant writing in House by the Buckeye Road: "Phoenix again — 8 o'clock in the morning of a day in June, 1911, and it was warm when I got off the train at the station.... The sun was exceedingly bright and everything around the station glowed with the heat — even at 8 o'clock in the morning — and I began to be very warm and uncomfortable." She encountered a man who shrugged off the temperature. "This ain't hot yet. July an' August — them's the hot months. This is fine weather now. Nights still fine an' cool." She asked how people stood it if it got hotter?

We-ell, you kinda get used to it, an' it ain't the kinda heat that hurts people. They don't get sunstroke here like in some of them eastern states. It's the dry climate that does it, they say. Lots o' people come here for their health. Lots o' lungers, too...Lots 'o fresh air and sunshine.

As you can tell, the booster mentality goes back a long way. People were tougher then, or they left for cooler climes or died off. In old Phoenix, nearly every house and apartment (and some hotels) had sleeping porches. On the worst nights, they would sleep in wet sheets for relief (this is not a frontier legend).

The richer farmers, growers and businessmen sent their wives and children to coastal California or enclaves in the High Country on the railroad. One popular spot was Iron Springs, on the Santa Fe line between Phoenix and Prescott. The rest stayed in the oven and did the best they could. The situation had not been helped with the "Americanization" of the town, which involved tearing down and shunning the cooler adobe structures in favor of smart but hotter Victorians. Later, bungalows provided better air flow. Agriculture and the oasis of trees cooled the valley. Swimming in irrigation "laterals" and the large canals was a rite of passage (that was even true when I was young, though by that time Salt River Project had clearcut the trees and tall-grass, and frowned on trespassing).

The Fox Theater, brand new in 1931 and promising it was "cooled by refrigeration."

Everything changed with air conditioning, first with evaporative cooling in homes ("swamp coolers") and large refrigerated air units in hotels and movie theaters. The Hotel Westward Ho was the first building in Phoenix with modern air conditioning, in 1929. After World War II, so called electromechanical cooling units became ubiquitous — compact and economical enough to be a part of into every tract house built by John F. Long, Del Webb and John Hall (Hallcraft Homes) and their smaller imitators.

Air conditioning allowed the massive migration to the Sun Belt. The brutal high summer of the Sonoran Desert seemed tamed. That's where I came in, born a few years past mid-century, fortunate enough to have avoided the ordeals of my Arizona forebears. Still, the heat beat me down. It didn't become easier the longer I was in it. By the time I left in 1978, I was ready for a change, someplace, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, where the Phoenix summers weren't bleeding me.

Millions disagreed with me. By the time I came back in 2000, my little town had grown into a metropolis of 3.5 million people. Swimming pools were seemingly everywhere. Once-modest Willo (which didn't even have a name) was now jam-packed with luxury pools behind the historic homes. Abandoned green pools in the affordable tract homes of yesterday were a health hazard. Of course the newer reaches of 1,500 square miles of suburbia were graced by the latest pools, along with stories of their Midwestern transplants surprised by visiting rattlers and other critters.

Automobile technology had advanced dramatically, allowing even people of modest means to tool around town in complete comfort. Phoenix now moved to the same rhythm as Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles. From home to car to office, a totally artificial environment. And it worked — as long as the power stayed on and the gasoline was abundant. Many rise early to hike Camelback and other mountains, even in July and August. "You don't have to shovel sunshine," they tell me. "I love the heat."

They're in luck. Phoenix's summers have been getting hotter and lasting longer, mostly as a result of "local warming," ripping out the natural cooling of agriculture and even (real) desert and replacing it with concrete, asphalt, roofs and rocks.

Of particular concern is that rise in overnight lows. It was the drop in night-time temperatures that once made Phoenix, which sits in a frying-pan valley unlike higher-altitude Tucson, bearable. Nor is it confined to Phoenix. Tucson just endured its hottest June. Starting in the 1990s and growing more severe, major forest fires consumed vast amounts of the state. Now global warming will inevitably kick in, with consequences for snow pack, water, ecosystems, species extinctions, lethal wildfires — and even more severe summers. The fossil fuels burned to produce air conditioning and the leaking of refrigerants add to the greenhouse gases that produce climate change.

I'm old enough to remember a time when Phoenix had seven or eight nice months and four or five hot ones. Over the past two decades that ratio has come close to reversing. E.g., the cooldown not beginning until Thanksgiving. The essential nature and lethality of Phoenix's high summer is often a character in my David Mapstone Mysteries. Yet then will come along a year when it seems unusually temperate — for awhile. But that's the change in climate change.

The hotter, longer summers present a serious challenge to Phoenix. It doesn't matter whether the leadership acknowledges this reality or not. It doesn't matter how many bronzed lizards "like the heat." Or how many pipe dreams are floated of cool concrete that the Ayn Rand private sector somehow never adopts. A tipping point comes where an endeavor of this size is no longer affordable, where even our technology gods can't defeat a desert wronged.

Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

 

Comments

[Homeless]

A dry heat? Yes, like a microwave oven.

[soleri]

Given this nation's attitude about infrastructure investment - Socialism!!! - what happens in the future when Arizona has a huge power failure during the summer? Where do people go when all the highways are packed with overheating cars? If we truly cared about the economy (and not just making the rich richer), we'd be making crucial improvements to the power grid now. But we can't do anything that challenges the Randian paradigm. This isn't just Arizona, it's all of the Red States, united in fear and loathing of the public square.

I was born here in 1948. During the 1950s, we'd still have occasional daytime thunderstorms although the main shows were during the evening. Around 1970, the urban heat island was beginning to take hold and the daytime storms decreased. The last major daytime storm I can recall happened in August of 1983. The fringes of the metroplex still get these storms as they ping off the heat island's bubble. I'm not certain about this, but I would assume these storms are now causing greater damage to places like Fountain Hills, east Mesa, and Queen Creek.

The epicenter of the heat island is central Phoenix. When the inevitable decision comes to dramatically increase water rates, this will be the place that will bear the greatest suffering. Xeriscaping the center city will seem like a good idea to greens and greedheads alike, but it will only serve to worsen the already stressed urban climate zone. We desperately need trees and grass to cool this place down but the boosters will tell us that "we live in a desert". I want to scream back at them: a desert is actually an ecosystem. This, by contrast, will be a wasteland. At that point, I should be living in Portland, so I'll be sure to write.

[soleri]

The future:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/southwest-forests-megafires-normal

[eclecticdog]

I always avoided swimming in the canals. The first friend I can remember drowned in one around Scottsdale Road and Camelback circa 1961. He was four or five years old.

I went to the baseball game Sunday and as we were leaving a little girl behind us said, "its so hot, its like fire". And it was. More like August than July of old.

[morecleanair]

For me, the longer summer with its almost unrelenting heat means more than just "sun". It means more (lung-scarring) Bad Ozone and more skin damage. I've become a poster guy for Mohs surgery. Footnote: Phoenix has skin cancer rates that are second only to Queensland in Australia, yet most of the dumb-assed golfers don't know enough to cover up and lather on their screener.

So, what to do? Once, I looked into an escape place in the high country . . not fully realizing the risks of fire and Mormons. Then, we fell in love again with the Oregon coast, having been captivated many years ago. Now, we have become climate refugees rather than just snowbirds. It is clean and cool and green. Stuff grows year around. Rhodies, azaleas and all manner of flowers flourish from April through October. There's an active arts scene and great restaurants no more than 20 minutes away. There are way more moderates here who join us in thinking that Arizona has become really whacked out.

Sorry for the self-absorbed rambling, but after 40+ years in Phoenix I find the place almost a total turn-off except for the fact that my family still lives there.

[Tom Smith]

Terrific post! Thanks for the "look back" when our beloved town was a lot different than it is today. Still, this midwest transplant of 17 years wouldn't want to be anywhere else!

[Dawgzy]

This must be coot-dom: reminiscing. On the bus down Central home from highschool mid-Oct of '64 and seeing the temperature sign across from Park Central at 104, people along with me commenting- still so hot. The swamp cooler fanned a long hallway upstairs and we kids would line up head to toe at night. Better the wooden floor than a heat trapping mattress. There were huge ash trees on the west side of our lot, much grumbling about all the leaves to be raked during the fall. Sleeping on screened porch in Iron Springs smelling pine needles and the faint reek of animal pee then the 4 older kids sent off for the day with sack lunches for a ramble over boulders meeting up with other kids later near the Saxbys' small office and grocery. We had a crank telephone and a wind-up victrola there. Saturday nights the train would come through. Kids would put their ears to the tracks trying to be first to announce it coming and replacing their heads with pennies on the rail. In Phoenix the monsoons could be intensely scary for a young kid. We had tall, thin palms in front and the winds so strong that they seemed to bend double. The air/sky would go green, storm drains might clog with blown down palm debris , then water over the streetcurbs- what fun! As a seasoned (sometimes mildewed) Oregonian I wonder about whether/when we'll have climate refugees, whether the state might export water. If y'all have any problems at the border just tell 'em you're with Dawgzy up in Portland.

[100 Octane]

Gershwin? I thought that was from a Sublime song.
Great writing, Phoenix 101 never disappoints but this one was both charming and current. I often think of modern America in terms of my own childhood and what has been lost. Although Phoenix in the 1960s sounds more fun than my semi rural roots in the South.
morecleanair said "after 40 years this place is a total turnoff". I have much less time invested but often feel the same.
Northern Arizona still great for train watching though.

[Allen Weiner]

Nailed it:

When I came back to Phoenix, it was amusing to see how the corporatized television stations had made weather a big deal, as if they were in Oklahoma.

[Rogue Columnist]

There are some good new posts from Emil on the most recent Friday Saloon.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Side note: three new comments in the previous Friday Saloon, including: a reply to Soleri re "preemptive capitulation; a pro-Nazi screed possibly written by a relation of the Koch brothers; and Andy Tobin's opportunistic (and very brief) embrace of communitarianism.

[Emil Pulsifer]

You beat me too it, Rogue: but thanks!

[soleri]

Emil, I posted a response.

[Petro]

Also in Friday Saloon - soleri wins me over...

[morecleanair]

USA Today is now engaging in some truth-telling about the heat and the drought we face in AZ. Their corporate affiliates in Phoenix still make light of it . . . bad for bizness y'know. That is to say, if your bizness is building or selling stucco crap-ola the game may be changing. Fred and Myrtle from Cedar Falls may be less willing to retire or "winter" in Phoenix if the truth gets out. Sidebar: "championship golf" is yesterday's strategy . . prices up, usage down throughout the Valley. Many clubs in tough financial shape with no relief in sight as the demographics are against them.

[eclecticdog]

Andrew Sullivan is evidently trying to become the Atlantic's David Brooks. A dog's breath of an article (ref. the link below):

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/07/09/a-redder-and-bluer-world/

[Emil Pulsifer]

Side note: a new comment in the previous Friday Saloon on why it's OK for liberals to critique Obama (and offering some strong but fair criticisms).

[headless]

...and we stood in lines going around the block at the Bank of Douglas to deposit our paychecks on Friday. There were no ATM's in existence at the time.

The blacktop parking lot would smell like the La Brea tar pits and the heat-softened asphalt would stick to the leather soles of our Florsheims. The full fury of the afternoon summer sun would bake our eyeballs in red gobbets of meat until we were functionally sun-blind.

Yep! That's the way it was - and we liked it!!!!

[Petro]

Haha, e-dog, thanks for the link. Brooks, yes, with a salt of Thomas Friedman - I'm surprised there wasn't a taxi driver quote. (Though I think these middlers are all on alert not to admit to the taxi driver. Ever. Again.)

[ChrisInDenver]

Jon, did the storm rip the roof of your former home when you lived in it or after you left town? If it's the latter, how'd you come to find out? Just curious. Thanks.

[cal Lash]

"even our technology gods can't defeat a desert wronged."
Amen
and may the spirit of Edward Abbey Haunt us.

Home on wheels may be a good thing?

[Rogue Columnist]

Chris, it was after I left. I keep in close touch with Phoenix. Otherwise, how could I write Rogue?

[Lifer]

The oracle predicts a Mapstone move to Seattle and severance of the hometown Umbilical cord. Big loss for Phoenix as it fries and dies.

[cal Lash]

Seattle drowns under Global warming tidal waves. The red dude and the phantom of spot ROLL on.

[[email protected]]

The media still doesn't get it. The first ? is always-who or what caused the fire? Every U.S. citizen is causing the fire by still relying on a petro economy that is baking us to death. Churchill was right: Americans can be counted on doing the right thing -- after trying everything else.The problem is that we have set the example for the rest of the developing world and they are resisting accepting climate change just as we have done. This is all the corps need to sow enough dissension among the pubs to allow them to continue a fossil fuel economy and continue to collect trillions.
At 66, I can sit in my cabin in Flagstaff and enjoy it's climate,but I truly fear for my children and their children.

P.S. Moyers' Frontline Wed. night should be mandatory viewing by anyone who cares about the future. It amazes me how resilience and subservient the middle class has become.

[Rogue Columnist]

Is that a request or a hope, Lifer?

I never promised I would write Rogue forever. Indeed, I would happily give it up if **anyone** in Phoenix media were writing the perspective, facts, context, history and reality that it provides.

The way I was raised, I have come to realize, was very strange. I was taught that Phoenix only existed because of the sacrifices and hard work of those who came before -- so I owed.

As for Mapstone, one can't swing a dead cat in Seattle without hitting a published author. Seattle has plenty of fictional detectives. Phoenix only has Mapstone. So he'll be staying there. If you want to see me writing about Seattle, check out my thriller, "Deadline Man."

I've lived all over the country. So Denver, San Diego and Cincinnati are all my adopted hometowns. The same with Seattle. But Phoenix will always be the home of my heart, even if it doesn't want me.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Side-note: a new comment in the previous Friday Saloon explaining the power of the reconciliation process, and how the Democrats punted, fearing Republican backlash:

http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2013/07/the-friday-saloon.html

[Lifer]

Neither Rogue. Phoenix needs all the help it can get. Mapstone gets better with each book.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Side-note: one final (additional) sally re Obama and compromise added to the previous Friday Saloon.

[headless]

Speaking of summers of olde in the Valley of the Sun -- what about open irrigation canals and the huge old cottonwood trees -- perfect for tree house 'forts'.

[morecleanair]

In Fountain Hills, 40% of the population is GONE until it begins filtering back in October. Some are in the high country. Some are traveling the US. Some are "back home" in the Midwest.

This is based on an engineer's study of sewer/water usage . . . and the seasonal drain is increasing. Maybe this is of little import; however I see it as perhaps a portent of what is to come.

[Colleen]

I miss that metal guy, thank you for posting that particular pic. He is smaller than I remember. He seemed huge to me then. I also miss the days when Iron Springs was the defining symbol (for me) of old money privilege. How quaint that seems now. Most of all, I miss the magic of Phoenix summer nights. Part of it was, no doubt, the optimism of youth that makes the future, even three hours into the future, a thing of beauty. More than that, though, it was the air - warm, but by 11:00p.m. gently warm and full of possibility. I could wax eloquent for days about the nights and the lights and the dream that was Phoenix at night in the summer, but I would either be preaching to the choir or unable to convey that special time in this special place. Either you were here or you weren't. Some things haven't changed. You can still tell the people who aren't from here by how fast they move outside as they rush from air conditioned space to air conditioned space in the summer. Anyone who is from here moves slowly and gently swims through the hot, thick, air unless someone is actually dying. I still take hot showers in the summer because everyone who engaged with summer before ubiquitous AC knows that there is little as pleasant as the cool sensation of stepping out of a hot shower into a to warm room. I never understood the physics of it, but a hot shower before going out into a hot day made it less onerous somehow and, for me, it still does. Plenty of hot water this time of year... It will be interesting to see where the next ten years take us. So far my acre-of-eden project is moving along nicely in what one of my neighbors calls "our own little slice of Michigan". The peaches and apples and berries and grapes seem to be thriving along with the citrus, pomegranates and other denizens of extreme heat climes. I wonder how long that will last. I lost a roof in Tempe to a microburst about 10 years ago. The house was insured and coming up on replacement anyway so it was no big deal at the time. My eden project property in Mesa backs up to three five story pine trees and an assortment of other tall 50+ year old trees. God help us all if they are microbusted. In Tempe a solid block wall (not mine) looked like a truck had driven through it. That kind of wind force would be devastating here. Still, I wouldn't trade the 15 degrees of cooler summer temps for the immediate safety of gravel and an occasional barrel cactus. Like the man said (misappropriating Mark Twain), "You pays your money and you takes your chances".