Along the Way

long the Way Text by James Tallon Photograph by Carltons' Photographic Summers Are Really Cool in Phoenix if You Know Where to Look

In September of 1540, Don Lopez de Cardenas and 12 other conquistadores stood on the 7,000-foot-high East Rim of the Grand Canyon and became the first white men to say, "You could freeze your buns up here."

If Cardenas' bunch had spent eight winters on the Rim as I did, it is highly unlikely they would have elaborated, as I do, "This is the most beautiful time of year at the Canyon." I suspect they would have complained continuously about the inferior insulating value of Spanish armor and, given the chance to crush terminal goosebumps, would have done what I did. When fate offered me the op-portunity to live and work in a place sunnier than sunny Spain, I took it: Phoenix, Arizona.

I settled into an attractive apartment complex on Indian School Road. Before I could unload my belongings from my car, the heat turned my vinyl record collection into ovals, and afterward themes like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" were only bad and ugly.

My first afternoon after work, I crashed in a lounge chair by the pool. A bunch of people in standard apartment garb - bi-kinis gathered around me, and one shook me and said, "Hey man, you want us to call 911?" (Or whatever the equiva-lent emergency phone number was at that time.) They had never seen a person wearing business clothes, complete with a tie, lying in full sun when the temperature was 110° F. They assumed I'd had a stroke. I was merely thawing out.

Frying eggs on Phoenix sidewalks has been unsuccessful, unless you like them very, very runny. Of course some local TV stations may try the stunt annually to introduce summer, just as they do in New York City or Los Angeles.

Sinking into melting blacktop was also largely exaggerated. But many years later, on a record-setting 122° F. day, as I walked across the parking lot of a local grocery, I had a La BreaTar-Pits-type thought: could there be cars, people, grocery carts, pets, and a winning lottery ticket below me?

There are Phoenicians who say to never, ever touch the door handle of your car in midday unless your hand is bleeding profusely, and you need it cauterized. Another exaggeration. One should, however, carry a topical burn ointment.

I learned that in Phoenix you listen to jokes about the heat: hyperbole and outright fabrications. The biggest rumor was that Barry Goldwater's ultraconservatism extended to Phoenix heat, and thus he conspired to Surrounded by modernistic heat-reflecting buildings and exotic vegetation such as hibiscus and bougainvillea, eucalyptus trees, and fan palms, I had to remind myself again and again that Phoenix is in the desert, the Sonoran Desert. The term "desert" conjures visions of 200-foothigh sand dunes where French Foreign Legionnaires fought among themselves when they weren't fighting with Bedouins. (I did, however, once see a guy wearing a burnoose on a motorcycle on Seventh Street.) In movies Legionnaires sweat profusely and continuously, but in Phoenix, sweat is called "perspiration," and relatively unexperienced. This is readily explained by Phoenicians: "It's a dry heat." TV weather-persons somehow combine humidity with temperature to derive a "comfort factor." For example, the thermometer may read 115° F., but thanks to the comfort factor, it feels like only 99° F.

In cities like Cincinnati and Chicago, 99° F. will cause incessant whining, or kill you, but Phoenicians are unperturbed. Outsiders are shocked when it's 100° F., and they see locals reaching for sweaters. Reaching for a sweater in Phoenix, however, merely means you are going out for dinner.

Phoenix restaurant owners keep temperatures set at the level at which ice carvings do not melt. Add to that a ceiling full of Casablanca fans turned on high and tugging at their moorings. Imagine coming out of, say, 115° F. and into interiors where coffee has skim ice on it. The higher the class of the restaurant the lower the temperatures. A clue that you've entered one of Phoenix's better eating establishments is the waitresses have watery eyes and runny noses and occasionally reach under a counter and take a pull at Alka-Seltzer Plus. Unlike diners, who invariably try to explain them away as "fashion," waitresses are not allowed to wear earmuffs.There were stories like: after sunset at my apartment complex if the water in the swimming pool hadn't stopped boiling, we residents would hasten the cooling by throwing 50-pound blocks of ice into it.

Out in the desert where there are no buildings, animals then surface from their cool, deep, underground dens to forage. Similarly, after dark, Phoenicians emerge en masse. To discourage Back East friends and relatives from dropping in for two-week visits, some head for post office mailboxes at shopping centers to fire off T-shirts that show a family of skeletons having a picnic in the desert.