By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” said one of the two women seated in front of me in the shuttle van at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport some while ago. Do I recall they were from New Jersey?
It was the customary misquotation of actress Judy Garland noticing that something’s really different in the Land of Oz.
I looked up from my book. Outside the van window were cactuses in airport planters. No surprise to me, but a different sight to the majority of U.S. residents, from cooler territories.
Living in the lower desert in summer isn’t the life most people are used to.
When I walk home from daily morning Mass at my parish, at about 9:30 a.m. the time-and-temperature sign facing the street at the chiropractor’s office may likely be above 100 degrees. Note that: at 9:30 a.m. already, not at the hottest hours of the afternoon. I recall 109 degrees one morning last summer.
Shortly after the middle of June this year, that electronic sign said 107 degrees one morning, cooled down to 106 the next day, and so on. The low temperature overnight may be in the 80s or even the 90s. Desert temperatures routinely may vary 20 or 30 degrees during the 24-hour cycle, but if the high was 115 degrees for the day, 25 degrees cooler is still only 90.
Even all of George Soros’ mischievous, meddling money and discountable “science” don’t make our weather worse than normal. But substantial growth in numbers of new residents does create “heat islands.” Long miles of concrete and asphalt have replaced little bushes, desert shrubs, and cactus in undeveloped land.
Air conditioning makes living indoors tolerable in ways that were unthinkable more than a century ago, when a much smaller, less-paved city in summer slept in wet sheets at night in the yard, or up on second-floor porches with a breeze, or sent the wife and kids to the mountains for a few months.
Still, I keep my thermostat for the house set at 85 degrees and definitely don’t wear turtlenecks, rather than pay a ransom every month for energy.
This weather report from the Sonoran Desert means to clarify recent national headlines about how hot it has been here, some even claiming so-called global warming at work. Heck, even the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic paper cited the left’s superstitions about climate, but that paper buys the left’s superstitions about lots of things, including endorsing Hillary Clinton for president last year.
Even Rush Limbaugh, noticing news coverage, tried to figure whether something unusual was afoot here on the burning sidewalks. On June 20 Limbaugh said he’d looked up the average temperatures for “Arizona” for June, July, and August, and they averaged 104, 106, and 104 degrees.
Now wait a minute, Rush. Tell me what’s the average temperature for “California.” An even larger state in area than Arizona, but with many of the same geographic variations. Would you mean the temperature in California’s Death Valley or San Francisco, Mount Whitney, or San Diego by the airport?
Yuma, nearly at Arizona’s southwestern corner, isn’t far above sea level. Flagstaff, in north-central Arizona, is nearly 7,000 feet high, and the nearby San Francisco Peaks top out at about 12,600 feet.
Limbaugh was talking about the Phoenix area, which is about at 1,100 feet elevation. That’s lower than the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Do the math. The Canyon’s rims are around 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, and the Canyon is around a mile deep.
Flying to Las Vegas in 2010 to cover a political debate for The Wanderer, I looked down to the right and saw the land rising toward the Canyon, and a little town where kids probably were just awaking for breakfast and school, to read textbooks about Paleozoic formations up that very slope.
A few weeks after we arrived in Phoenix in 1958 from the Midwest, shortly before I turned into a teenager, I was mowing the grass at 118 degrees here, the record high as of then. Every summer the high temperature isn’t merely going to exceed 100 degrees, it might even exceed 110 degrees for a total of up to maybe three or four weeks of individual days.
It’ll probably go over 100 for the first time in April or May, and drop below 100 for the maximum in late September or October. Only three months here have never seen 100 degrees, December, January, and February.
I don’t mean to minimize the effects of high temperatures. They can kill. Not a good idea to play golf or climb a Phoenix mountain at 2 p.m. in July. But when you’re accustomed to hearing the day’s high will be 115 or 116, the fact that it rarely might be a few degrees higher than that doesn’t sound remarkable.
When my home a.c. broke down and couldn’t be fixed for five days maybe a decade ago, I managed to sleep at home for four nights before throwing in the sweat-soaked towel, as it were, and sleeping in the spare room at a neighbor’s the fifth night. Wouldn’t want to do that again. That week, I absolutely loved to get up for work at my air-conditioned day job.
People make adjustments to make their lives worthwhile in many different locations with weather challenges.
Moving to Florida or Louisiana means making the choice to live with the certainty of hurricanes, although hopefully not too severe or frequent. A lot of Plains cities are in Tornado Alley. Flying into Boston once, I noticed boathouses lining the shore whose boats I figured would be “wasted” during the inclement months, but it’s a tradeoff many make.
Phoenix is the fifth-largest city by population in the U.S., about 1.6 million people, surrounded by a number of large suburbs that, when totaled, exceed the Phoenix population.
If people like Arizona but don’t like heat, they could go live somewhere like Flagstaff or Prescott, in the mountains. Indeed, the Prescott area seems pretty popular with former Californians. But it looks like most people who move here from the Midwest or Northeast have had their fill of snow and want no more, thereby choosing a griddle for summertime.
Gotta tell you, usually low desert humidity really makes a difference. You Midwesterners know what a walk in 106 degrees would do to you, but I don’t even see perspiration when humidity runs around 10 percent to 20 percent here. There’s perspiration, sure, but the air’s so dry it just evaporates. I’ve done hours of yard work without seeing a glisten. But this older me would no longer mow grass when it’s 118.
The weather pattern shifts about the beginning of July through the end of August, bringing more humidity, maybe often running in the 30s percentage-wise rather than the usual 10 to 20 percent. We’re not soaking in our shirts but, having learned to be humidity-sensitive, we feel an uncomfortable difference.
Normally the prevailing weather comes here from the Pacific Ocean, nicely dried out by crossing California’s coastal mountains then the deserts of the Golden and Grand Canyon states. But after summer heat builds up enough here, it shoves its way westward, sucking moister air behind it, up the Rio Grande Valley from the Gulf of Mexico.
Flying into coastal southern California, I’ll see the “marine layer” of clouds standing offshore at this time, pushed out to the west, rather than providing the urban overcast of “May gray” or “June gloom” that San Diegans complain of.
Purgatory
Make no mistake, this is the worst-feeling time of year in the Phoenix metropolitan area. More humidity and more chances of rain in what’s called the “summer monsoon,” which means downpours, not sprinkles. A desert area that averages about eight inches of rain all year can get a lot of it at once.
The late afternoon of August 2, 2016, brought two inches of rain in an hour in some weather gauges. A normal 15-minute drive downtown on a freeway became more than an hour’s drive on city streets sloshing from curb to curb.
And don’t forget the summer dust storms. They form on the desert between Tucson and Phoenix and then, towering perhaps thousands of feet, head north to swallow the Phoenix metropolitan area. They don’t last long at one spot, but imperil motorists who try to drive blind. And they can leave a mess. Fortunately, they’re not frequent in town.
Even though my car was parked under its carport roof, the huge July 5, 2011, evening dust storm left an inch of standing dust all over the car. People could only thank God that the dust hadn’t hit one night earlier, when thousands of people were outdoors at parks to watch Fourth of July fireworks.
Yes, we turn out in fiery July heat to watch fireworks, too. A way of life on the desert. We’re doing our Purgatory now. That’s a thought to walk home with from daily Mass.
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