Smacked in the gob
Gobsmacked. That’s a word folks use across the pond for being taken aback by something. Even though I’ve lived in the Imperial Valley for nearly 30 years, I’ve been gobsmacked each time I walk out the door in recent days.
In Ireland, where I led a studyabroad group for a month until I returned last week, locals were suffering what they considered a horrific heat wave. Temperatures sometimes reached into … get this … the unbearable, for the Irish, low 80s.
Sixty-year-old Irish men were walking the streets without shirts, in droves. I haven’t seen that much sag since I went to an Eminem concert in the 2002. (Okay, I didn’t go to a Marshall Mathers concert in 2002, or ever, but it worked for the joke.)
Those of us on the trip from the Imperial Valley were more than amused by the Irish being so overheated by summer temperatures that we would not only welcome but treasure, any time of the year. It was funny. It was cute. “Let us tell you about heat,” we thought, and often said.
Even after four weeks in Ireland’s hottest run of weather in decades, coming back to the Valley in mid-July smacks one right in the old gob. And I’m far from a weather lightweight. I’ve only lived in hot places: the San Joaquin Valley, the edge of the San Joaquin Valley, Georgia (the state of) and the Imperial Valley.
I’m fine with daily high temperatures being 95, even 100, even 102. But on days when it’s 108 degrees, or higher, at 7:45 p.m., as it has been lately, it takes the wind right out of me each time I walk out the door.
I have to wade into the wicked weather even more this summer because I have a puppy who needs to be exercised a couple times a day. So I venture into the inferno and return drenched with sweat and drained of, among other things, life.
As hard as it is for me to be out there for an hour or so, I feel for those who have to work in this hell for hours each day, the road workers, farm and ranch workers, utility linemen, construction workers and others. They’re tough, brave men and women who keep our society fed and moving while sacrificing their comfort and risking their health.
Whenever I return to the Imperial Valley from overseas I’m shocked by seeing so many overweight people, from the quite pudgy to the morbidly obese. I wonder how these folks, carrying all that extra weight, do anything outside of their homes during the Valley summer. I wonder if they realize they’re making summer life in the Valley even more unbearable by being so heavy.
I have many overweight students who argue that they’re that way because it is too hot for half the year to even consider exercising outdoors. I always make this novel suggestion: exercise indoors. Go to a gym, buy exercise machines, such as bikes and/or steppers, for your house, even dance to a damn Zumba DVD. Do something. Don’t just resign yourself to being overweight and miserable, because the pounds and pounds of fat only make the Valley heat worse.
That said, I guess I can look at this weather stuff optimistically. There are only two months left of this horribly hot weather, and I was fortunate enough to get out of it for a month.
Or I can look at it pessimistically. There are still two more damn months of this horribly hot weather and I was only able to get out of it for a month.
Either way, I know I’m going to be gobsmacked each time I open the door for about another 60 days.