On a recent work-related trip into the August swamps and green, late summer rivers near the Gulf Coast, I had the opportunity to understand the full implications of air conditioning in the South. Outside, it was so boiling that you weren’t sure whether to sweat or cry. Inside, however, behind panes coated with water beads like a glass of iced tea, it was 65 degrees.
If you are from down there, you already know the coast is about ten degrees cooler than ten miles inland. Twenty miles inland is even worse. We were about 75 miles inland – the death zone of humidity.
Air conditioning is as ubiquitous as drawls and fried food. Our hotel was 65 degrees. I turned my thermostat up to 75 every night. When I returned late every evening, after a day of shooting in the heat, the housekeeping staff had adjusted it back down to 65. Eventually, I left it there, thankful for the mechanical cool. Restaurants were clicked to 65. The convenience stores were 65. Soon, we ratcheted our automobile air down to 65 on the small digital dial. When in Rome.
Without the Freon breeze to make the atmosphere reasonably tolerable, I figure the population below an invisible line from Savannah, Georgia to El Paso, Texas would be reduced to about 10,000 people or so. You think all of those retirees would be moving to Florida without air conditioning? Go anyplace south of Maryland between May and October, pull up a chaise lounge chair and sit there for a couple of hours reading Faulkner, then tell me how much you’d pay for a window unit.
Over the last few years, I have contributed my fair share of liquid to the humidity hanging over the loblollies and fire ants. I say that because my grandfather told me so. He said when you get that many people sweating all at once, it causes oppressive humidity.
“Sweat evaporation,” he said. “You get a few million people sweating and that water has to go somewhere. It goes into the air. That’s humidity.”
He was not a scientist or a meteorologist so his conjecture hardly qualifies as more than a farmer’s opinion, especially considering that it’s still like a jungle sauna across much of the South, even after air conditioning coaxed people inside cold rooms and out of the terraced fields. Farmers drive air conditioned tractors now.
Some professions haven’t wimped out like the rest of us, but all-in-all the South is 65 degrees all day long now. If, however, you go from 100 degrees to 65 degrees fifty times a day and sweat until your pants are guilty of first-degree swamp-ass hardy enough to grow mushrooms, it can play havoc on your cell structure. Cold to hot to cold to hot over and over is begging for bad mojo in the medical department.
Stay cold or stay hot but don’t bounce back and forth. Bacterial infections, allergies, summer colds and viruses the size of 10-point bucks roam under the Spanish moss, looking for the fool who tries to ride the temperature fence. We found out the hard way on a shoot in Louisiana – and paid for it at the business end of an infection that only antibiotic horse pills could cure.
Even with the risk of such nasty little bugs crawling up your snout and down your lungs, I don’t know a single Southerner of any race, creed or socioeconomic group who would give up their 65 degrees.
By the way, can you turn that thermostat down a little, it’s only 67º in here. Were you raised in a barbecue pit?