You Think THIS Is Hot?

The FXBG ADVANCE 7/8/26 MORNING READ

By Donnie Johnston, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

Rajiv Bajaj/Unsplash

Many people simply do not understand nature.

They stare in unbelieving horror at the TV screen when the weatherman predicts scorching days in July.

“What! Where did all this heat come from?!!?

Apparently, they were absent the day their sixth-grade science teacher talked about the seasons.

The way it works is like this: It gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Why that should surprise anyone is beyond me. This pattern has been going on for thousands of years, so you would think humans would have figured it out by now. Apparently, they haven’t.

We went through a hot stretch last week—seven straight days with high temperatures above 90 degrees; four consecutive days with the thermometer reaching 100 or more.

My goodness! You would have thought the world was going to end. TV weathermen strongly suggested hibernation, remaining in an air-conditioned burrow like a groundhog during a blizzard.

You may not believe this, but I worked outside in that 100-degree heat and lived to tell about it. Of course, I took precautions, getting my outside chores done before noon and after 6 p.m. (short outings during the heat of the afternoon). But I got them done. I didn’t let the heat stop me.

Neither heat nor cold frightens me because I grew up in an uninsulated house with no air conditioning. The truth is that no one I knew had AC. Maybe window fans, but no air-conditioning. The only AC was at the movie theater and in some – but not all – downtown stores. You sat in church with no AC – and, heaven help us, no bottled water!! And you survived.

The nights were so hot during heatwaves like we had last week that sometimes it was almost impossible for me to sleep. My bedroom window opened onto the front porch roof and some nights I would take a blanket and a pillow and go out and sleep between the overlapping seams of that tin covering (which had only a slight slope).

If I turned over, the metal ridges would wake me so it was relatively safe, even though it would have been a nine-foot drop had I fallen.

I can only imagine what passing motorists thought when they saw a 12-year-old boy asleep on the porch roof (we lived less than 50 feet from the road), but I was not concerned with what people thought. I just needed to get out of that oven bedroom. Around three o’clock in the morning, when the air cooled, I climbed back through my window and into my bed.

Hey! When you grow up poor, you learn to improvise.

Despite what today’s generation might think, we all, young and old, survived the summer heat just as we survived the winter cold. I’ve seen my 65-year-old grandfather pitch hay on a wagon in 95-degree heat, and during my childhood I picked up thousands of bales of hay in 95-degree heat.

My grandmother canned beans over a hot wood stove in 95-degree heat with no ill effects, and my 80-year-old aunt chopped in the garden on even the hottest days. No one died. No one got sick

We survived without air-conditioning. A front porch swing, the shade of a front-yard tree, or the movement of a funeral home fan provided the only relief for poor country people. But we got by with only the usual complaints about the weather. We understood that it would get hot in the summer.

“But people were tougher back then!”

That is as much as admitting that we have turned into a society of weaklings, which is what I choose not to become. I accept the heat and learn to live with it.

One difference between now and then is that no fear tactics were used when I was a child. Now we turn on the TV and the weather forecasters in their cooled newsrooms warn us of imminent doom if we so much as venture out into 100-degree heat. And they repeat these warnings over and over and over.

When I was growing up, the weather report was a 30-second tag at the end of a five-minute radio newscast.

“Partly cloudy, hot and humid, with high temperatures around 98 degrees.”

That was it. No “So hot the world is gonna end,” no dramatics, no theatrics. Forecasters figured that if they gave us an indication of the heat, we would have brains enough to figure out how to handle it. And we did.

Now, forecasters think the public is so stupid that they must even tell us what clothes to wear in every kind of weather.

Sometimes I think they are right.

My generation and before had a greater understanding of weather. We did not fear it but rather respected it. And we prepared for it. But that didn’t mean that we didn’t use technology. If we had hay to rake that afternoon, we would listen to the noon news on AM radio. If there was static, we knew that there was an electrical storm somewhere within 30 miles. The louder that static, the closer the storm. This would tell us not to put the hay in windrows because rain was coming.

Today’s generation has no idea what AM static is.

If you could hear the train whistle 15 miles away, you knew there was moisture in the air and planned accordingly.

And if the watermelon vines were wilting in the afternoon sun, you knew the temperature was in the upper 90s. You didn’t need a thermometer.

Every so often I hear someone say, “Man, I’ve never seen it this hot before!” and I reply, “You’re only 30 years old. That doesn’t give you much reference.” That’s like my contemporaries exclaiming, “We don’t have winters like we used to! When I was a child, the snow was up to my knees!” I have to remind them that when they were a child, they were three feet tall.

I also occasionally hear, “It has never been this hot before. I looked up the records.” To which I ask, “What about that July day 15,000 years ago?”

We have only been keeping weather records since 1872, about 150 years. On a four-billion-year-old planet, that’s less than a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.

Whatever the temperature, it has at some point been that hot or cold before. There is nothing unique about today’s weather in the overall scheme of Planet Earth.

That’s our science lesson for today. Just remember, in the summer it gets hot, so expect it.

In January we’ll have another lesson and I will explain that in the winter it gets cold.

Class dismissed. Don’t miss your bus!