Hot

Of the many things we had to contend with on the journeys, weather seemed to be a reoccurring event, and we encountered the various extremes the summer weather had to offer. One obvious extreme that made the car travel rather unpleasant almost every trip, was heat, especially in the southwest desert mid-July. It could literally get up to 110 degrees inside the car if you dared look at a thermometer. Driving with the windows down only resulted in a blowing furnace-like 106 degrees, which wasn’t much better, unless you were wet from water gathered from the ice chests. We had come up with various survival tricks to mimic air conditioning, the most effective being rubbing yourself down with a Wash ‘n Dri and letting the wind from the open windows react with the cooling alcohol of the wet nap. This had only a temporary effect and needed to be repeated more often than practical, and I suspect now probably made us even hotter in the long-run. We also had a little battery operated fan, which was originally part of a toy – a cheap plastic hovercraft vehicle powered by the fan at the end of a 3 foot cable connected by a motor and 4 D cell batteries. The actual hovercraft vehicle part had been broken off leaving this nifty little fan that could be pointed directly at ones face for a refreshing breeze, which could be accentuated by the alcoholic reaction of a Wash ‘n Dri. The fan also became a useful torture device on my sister by letting the fan snap on sensitive parts of the skin, or better, sticking the moving fan in her hair causing a painful tangle that required force and surgery to remove.

Often to make matters worse, (believe it or not), my dad would blast the car heater in these situations. The justification was that it helped the car from over-heating, but everyone else in the car was convinced it was to be mean, especially since dad always wore a dark windbreaker, long sleeves and one of those gray plastic sauna-suits under all those clothes while he drove, everyone thought he actually liked being uncomfortably hot and on the brink of stroke. Whatever the case, it always pissed everyone off when we discovered the heat was on while the outside temperature was well over a hundred and five. The reaction we always got from him was a smirkish and illogical excuse that was bordering on conspiracy, and an ultimate assertion of authority over the car and the control of the heater.