Dying by degrees…

After a week and the better part of another out west, out where, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, temperatures flirted with a decidedly coquettish 70, where, in Montana, temps hit the upper 80s, albeit with the humidity in the temperate 30s, we bird-dogged this summer’s heat wave home to Iowa.

Driving east from Rapid City, South Dakota, we saw temperatures climb from the mid-90s to 100, eventually to 106, the road crews on I-90 somehow undeterred. Me, at the same time, cursing my whereabouts, blessing the car’s air conditioning, wishing somehow that sometime soon all this, this intimation of hell, would break.

We’re home now ten days, and I’m still breaking sweat.

Oh, sure, it has rained, often and to notable effect, that much water on so much hot rock creating nothing more than a regional sauna. And the temp here has dipped, maybe, to the upper 80s, only to rebound to, what, to some, a tepid, 95; to others, a balmy 97.

“I’m Irish,” I tell Karen, as I, suffering, surrender, heart, soul, arms- akimbo in abject submission, to the nearest air conditioner. “I’m built for cold, bleak islands.”

Indeed, Iowa itself, neither particularly cold, nor in any way bleak, let alone an island, unless imagined as some landlocked island of corn, is hardly hospitable to the likes of me, even as it makes itself home on so many other levels.

Heart of the heartland, the state certainly wears that heart on its sleeve, welcoming one, all, even as it welcomed my own family almost a dozen years ago, the only test that, and a test somewhat less than a test at that, of winter.

“Been through an Iowa winter?” we were asked, asked often, as newcomers to Iowa, those winters from the first scarcely requiring attention compared to the winters we had known in northern Vermont.

“When does winter start?” our own Vermont-born kids asked, halfway through our first Iowa winter, their disappointment measured as much by inflection as by the dismay on their faces.

And every summer here since, even as the corn, year after year, revels in heat, in humidity, I crank the air conditioners, only, only to make life here, at least summer here, otherwise tolerable, somehow still tolerable.

Outside, though, I die, die by degrees, wishing fewer of them in summer, fewer even in winter; wishing this summer, every summer, to feel what I so rarely feel: alive.

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon