Dog days...

In Iowa, this time of year, heat hangs heavily.

You can see it in the trees, slack-shouldered, knees to the ground, sweat all but dripping from the drooping leaves. The grass, too, so recently eager to roll out its green carpet in that remembered blush of spring, now staunches its once-and-future youthful enthusiasm in favor of a more seasoned approach to summer. And everywhere, flowers, the sun-worshippers among them anyway, bare all, petals akimbo, stamens and pistils all but whistling at bees that might be up for a buzz. Those blossoms more demure, sidelined by choice to shade or chance to shadow, Mona-Lisa from the background, their modesty draped in a well-placed sepal or three.

In any other year, you could also drive down any back road of your choosing, your wheels churning a dust-devil of gravel and powder to chart your passage against a sky-blue sky, with the road itself rimmed on either side with corn high as the nearest elephant’s eye. This year, however, floods have stemmed the corn’s tide, so much so that Iowa’s seasonal sea of corn, rising and falling on a groundswell of hill and hollow, is, in most places, a foot or two shallower. Not so, though, the layer of haze above, as all those acres of corn pump up the already amped humidity, thickening all the more the gumboed summer air.

Across a more charted, more Atlantic ocean, the rain in Spain may still fall mainly on the plain, but, l’air en France, or at least in that part of the country known as Cognac, is the better for the “angels’ share,” that surprisingly large percentage of alcohol lost in its aging by the local eaux-de-vie to evaporation. Not to be out-proofed, however, those who care about such things have also shown that Iowa’s humidity owes much to the transpiration of mega-acres of corn, conjuring images of the entire state heaving on inspiration and blurring the horizon with the first morning breath. Still, it beggars the same imagination that any angels of any persuasion, perched wing-to-wing on a fence rail in some Iowa that is truly heaven and not merely a field in someone’s dreams, are huffing corn when there’s headier cognac to be had, but, hey, whatever rings an angel’s bell.

Me?

I’m no angel, especially when it comes to taking the heat, since my inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees — anything above might as well be a hundred, just ask the woman who shares my life and who suffers the consequences on these, the most howling of my dog days. Toss in humidity to fire up the heat index, and I’m the unhappiest bowser you can imagine. Indeed, I have been known to enter the locally famous beer vault at John’s Grocery in Iowa City and pipe to any who would listen, usually and only that same long-suffering bride, that you could haul in a desk and maybe punch out a window, and I’d be in hop heaven. Back at home, though, under less air- or, for that matter, cask-conditioned circumstances, I am the one long-suffering, known to lament often and aloud, much to the chagrin of the purgatoried souls around me, “I’m Irish, built for cold, bleak islands,” an observation bolstered by the fact that while I’m stripped to shorts, and still complaining, everyone else is shivering under blankets.

Back in those fresh-from-Vermont, new-to-Iowa days when we lived in West Branch on the outskirts of Iowa City, back when I was still in med school, our own backyard butted against a cornfield at the town’s eastern edge. On those dog days of those first summers, made junkyard-dog days by the added heat of med school itself, when there was no beer vault anywhere around stocked well enough to slake my discontent or cool enough to temper my distemper, I was known to ramble to the fence line separating the crew-cut grass from the rank-and-order corn beyond. I’d stand there, still as the stalks themselves, face to the field, feet rooted, haloed myself by the academic haze du jour, whether it was anatomy or path, micro or pharm, and would watch, literally, the corn grow.

It was an intentionally mindless activity, demanding little more than observation on any voluntary level and as little obligatory perspiration as I had to muster. No fathoming the function of kidneys at a cellular level, no cramming the kinetics of this or that analgesic, no mapping the neural comings and goings of the brachial plexus. Only the horizon inching higher, seemingly by the hour, the corn in a cloudless sky breathing in and breathing out, leaves splayed in the sun, tassels tossed to the breeze, and, as the weeks wore on, the field itself all ears, attuned to some distant and timeless melody, its rhythm the rhythm of that summer and every summer before and since.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon