Clay Thompson
The Arizona Republic
June 10, 2002
You know those winter festivals they have in cold-weather cities? With the ice sculptures and the snowmobile races and the old guys in Speedos swimming in a lake on New Year's Day and stuff like that?
The idea, I guess, is to show how tough they are and how they revel in their weather no matter how rotten it is.
Did you ever wonder why we don't do that here; put on a hot-weather festival with sand swimming or molten asphalt sculptures or 110-degree 10Ks?
Because we're not complete morons, that's why. It's too hot. We'd have to hold it in an air-conditioned auditorium, which would sort of defeat the purpose of showing what hot-weather hard-asses we are.
It's hot here.
This is a fact of life. We live on a desert.
I've always liked it, by the way, that "on" is the appropriate word in that sentence. You might live "in" a forest or "by" a lake, but you live "on" a desert, in the same sense that bacon is on a griddle.
We like to sneer at snowbirds who loll around the Valley all winter and then head for their lakeside cabins in northern Wisconsin as soon as it gets over 80 here. And sometimes you hear someone talk about how much they like to camp on the desert in July or how they're not going to let a little case of butt rash keep them off Squaw Peak at noon.
This is hooey.
Don't tell me that if one of those snowbirds invited you to spend July at the lakeside cabin in northern Wisconsin you wouldn't go because you'd be afraid you might miss a dust storm back home.
I was going to write something about how hot weather defines us and makes us who we are, but that would be hooey, too. Air conditioning and swamp coolers and swimming pools and cheap flights to San Diego are what define us and make us who we are. We don't revel in hot weather. We survive it.
I once met a woman many years ago who by choice lived year-round in Phoenix in a house that did not have evaporative cooling or air conditioning. Really. I forget what the point was, and where in the world she even found such a house is beyond me.
At the time, I thought she was eccentric. I have since come to see the matter differently. She wasn't eccentric. Eccentric is deliberately wearing socks that don't match. She was nuts.
Maybe we should have a summer hot-weather festival, after all; something to boost civic pride and show the world how tough we are. We could hold it on some really hot day at one of the big desert parks with no shade and have sweating contests and arts and crafts and barbecues and races or stuff like that.
Doesn't that sound like fun?
I don't think so, either.
