TAKING THE HEAT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
June 23, 1985
Author: GENE WEINGARTEN Herald Tropic Editor

"Garbage pickup is twice a week ...."

I could not believe this. The man who was going to rent me his home was droning calmly along as though it were not a hundred and sixty degrees or something and I were not sitting there, gasping for oxygen in this unspeakable August heat, as if a bead of sweat were not dangling from my nose and my clothes were not an embarrassment of pungency. As if I were not about to die.

We were in the living room. There was no air conditioning. He looked cool. He had lived here for years. I'd just arrived in Miami from New York.

" . . . you'll need the gardener twice a month. He charges $35 because the grass gets so high. It really should be cut every week, it grows so fast . . .

What is this man saying? Something about grass that grows like a malignancy. I need a drink . . .

"You'll want the exterminator at least once a month during the summer for the fleas and roaches and, um, you have to hunt around from time to time for these little egglike things because that means termites . . . "

I will not listen to this. I will hum nonsense syllables to drown it out.

"The hurricane shutters are in the garage. You don't have to nail them up until the storm is, like, two or three hours offshore. Make sure you always have a lot of canned food and flashlights and candles . . ."

Na na na na na na na . . .

That was in 1981. It was my introduction to summer in South Florida, that relentless punishment that Tropic writer John Katzenbach once called The Mean Season and that Joel Achenbach renames today.

The Long Fever, he calls it.

I couldn't have put it better. Like a fever, The Heat invades our bodies. Like a fever, it quickens the pulse and opens the pores. Like a fever, it courts delirium.

Coleridge had some of his most creative ideas while delirious. And so, too, did we in Tropic several weeks ago when we decided, as the mercury was first beginning to rise to merely oppressive levels (it had not yet begun to be truly savage), that we would devote an entire issue to the subject of heat in South Florida. Our reasoning, such as it was, went this way:

As always, summer heat will come crashing down on us, the most evident social event of the season. We can pretend it isn't there, as our travel agents and chambers of commerce tend to do, but that would be like trying to ignore the rhinoceros in your kitchen.

We could bleat and moan about it. But that would be unproductive.

Or we could throw the heat a party. A surprise party. We could embrace it, like a friend. Maybe it will be nicer to us.

And so, today, we give you Dave Barry on heat. Al Burt on heat. Just A Moment is on heat. Even our People Etc. column is on heat: local celebrities talk about their most sweltering moments. We give you a slightly prissy, very useful guide to fighting mold, mildew, fleas, cranky air conditioning, sunburn, sweat stains, lawn burnout and more.

And we give you Joel Achenbach on The Fever.

Today, Joel answers the old unanswerable question: do you feed a cold and starve a fever, or vice versa?

This fever, you feed. You don't starve The Heat by denying its dominion, by hiding behind drawn drapes and roaring AC, for in time it will run you down, and punish you.

You nourish it, with your own body. You surrender to it, and you are at peace. Joel will explain.

I will tell you this: a few weeks ago I was mowing my lawn at midday when a man stopped his car and rolled down his window to ask me directions. A blast of AC assaulted me. The directions were complicated and took a while to explain. The man was getting hotter and hotter as the cool air left. A pained expression washed across his face. A look of mild hysteria settled in his eyes.

"You, er, new here?" I asked.

"Uh huh," he gasped.

I wanted to tell him what I had learned in the last four years, but it would have been no use. He wouldn't have understood. If my landlord had explained it to me four years ago, I wouldn't have understood.

Give the guy a few summers. He'll figure it out.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC

Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald

"The Long Fever," by Joel Achenbach