MOUNTAIN VIEW: A Conditioned Response

This summer, I’ve appreciated the blessings of refrigerated air:
Cold glacial chunks of pink watermelon on a muggy afternoon. A jar of ice-cube-clinking lemonade forming beads and a wet ring on the counter, and which you hold to your hot face before swigging. The lovely, soul-restoring bliss of chilled chocolate milk, falling through the floors of your innards like a rich cold river, bringing old memories and hopes to life.
Then, there’s my car. I have no AC because I rarely used it in my last car, and don’t drive many long stints on the sun-beaten interstate.
“I don’t give a durn,” I agreeably told the dealer, who knocked the price down several thousand miles when I opted for the AC-free version of this vehicle. Possibly he knew he’d not be able to unload it on any other customer in the USA.
And it’s true that I disliked my car’s AC, back when I had some. It felt like driving in a cold glass vacuum, completely separate from the land or air, while the gas tank needle dove leftward.
Today, without even the option of AC, I can appreciate its finer points. Other drivers in their cool, glass bubbles cheerfully have discussions with their passengers. I have no passengers; nobody wants to ride through the August landscape inside a convector oven.
Other drivers contemplate the Universe, vague smiles on their philosophical faces, or admire the sizzling noon roadway whose heat no more affects them than the gases of Jupiter. They aren’t wiping saltwater off their eyes and squinting. Their black, chic sunglasses perch unperturbed on cool, dry, intelligent faces. These drivers are competent, sophisticated, suavely indifferent.
The driver of my car is wacko and learning, a quart jar of iced tea (originally composed of solid ice) melting in her lap, a sweatband clamping down her wind-yanked hair. The windows are half-open, filling her ears with a roar that drowns out any radio news and, of course, slows the car like a parachute whose drag likely uses more fuel than a refrigerated dairy truck.
At such moments, AC strikes me as a brilliant invention. And yet, I admit to a bizarre happiness as I billow along at a windy, open-boat 60 mph—trucks and cool cars whooshing past me in their contained, chilled efficiency. There’s a strange juvenation in the contrast between the cold jar and hot, grimy wind, the breaks in diesel fumes that reveal an underlying summer scent of mown hay, walnut trees, warm dirt and rivers. It feels like I belong to the land, the clouds, the warm summer wind, and the dripping jar of “coolant” waking up my ribcage.
Last August, I wrote a column about the old twilight porches, where people once sat and rocked, murmured a while, and then surrendered in silence to the loud thickets of vegetation and katydids. Several readers wrote to speculate on why we rarely sat on porches these days. “TV,” said one. “Malls,” another reckoned. “No time,” said a busy grandmother.
But almost all added the letters “AC.” So many people had it, across the U.S. landscape, that these readers felt porches had lost their function of shade and evening refreshment. The twilight shadows outdoors no longer felt cool, after the supper steam and hot dishwater, because the house was already chilled (the dishwasher humming and kitchen unsteamed by any cooking), and would stay—if not cooler than the night air—certainly sealed-off from the night as completely as a jar of jam from any oxygen.
Those of us without home air conditioning possibly appreciate and despise it more than anyone who lives acclimated to its brisk summer chill. Stepping into an air-conditioned office, out of a muggy afternoon, feels like one has suddenly gone to heaven and will soon see Jesus floating among the cool clouds.
But after a few minutes, a strange and contracting chill overcomes the visitor who is used to warm air and open windows and screen doors that bang, letting in flies and the heavy, rich smells of summer. No flies buzz in the air-conditioned office. No warm, evocative wind drifts through the efficient storm doors of the air-conditioned house. No smells of rotting apples or horse manure or drying hay. There is a feeling of sterile, silent preservation, here, like a nice, chilled funeral parlor.
Last year on NPR, a listener wrote of her brief power outage in the Midwest. AC was not an option. Her family creaked open the stiff windows of their old house, whisked the cobweb grit out of the sills, and prepared to rough it.
To her astonishment, a whole world and a life full of memories came pouring through those open windows—the smells of pasture, of sunshine and nightfall and rain. For the first time in years, they heard the sounds of frogs and crickets, cicadas and morning birds. They felt air stir on their skin and cool updrafts in the stairwell. The house felt ALIVE! Her daughter’s allergies disappeared. Even the dog looked happier snoozing on the cool linoleum.
She wondered what we had lost to the convenience of air conditioning, and made a good case for leaving it off, except in the direst of heat-waves, as her family had decided to do.
Whatever we’ve lost on the inside, it’s clear to me that the outer world often pays the price for an air conditioned society. Homeowners no longer try to preserve the shade around a house, trailer court, church or office complex. Instead, the landscape is often stark, hot, glaring with sun. A box hums in the window, or dozens of heat pumps clank and whir so constantly, nobody really cares to go sit outside amid the irksome noise.
Meanwhile, along roadways once roofed with green leafy trees, VDOT now keeps a clearance and cut-back corridor that ensures no twig will land on the road and no shade will come anywhere near the motorist. With every driver encased in air conditioning, it’s hard to remember the delight of those old shade-rippled, breezy drives through the green smells of countryside. It’s hard to feel connected, period, to that countryside.
Still, on my broiling drive to Roanoke this weekend, a cold wet jar in my lap, wind in my ears and exhaust fumes in my face, I will admit to some brief AC envy as the cool cars pass me and I lift my hand from its windy perch on the car roof, to wave.
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at .