Heat

This heat is nothing new. Seven generations of my people have trod the prairie badlands and I know within my heart that the heat of their journeys shimmered at the bare edges of their memories, just as it does with mine. Desert heat boils in my blood, just beneath the surface of my skin. Like a lizard on a rock, a part of me cannot go on without it. I defy the existence of cool hills, trees and water but I honor the unapologetic sun. My interest is focused by the conflict between easy and desperately harsh.

Neither I nor my father had to actually live through the temperature records of the Oklahoma dustbowl to know that danger as an integral part of our collective experience. My grandfather’s intractable fear that the world will turn to dust acknowledges 1936, when the blistering, parched wind robbed Mother Earth of rain for months on end, the hardy bunch grass withered, the longhorns died standing on the prairie and our very lifeblood was whipped into blinding clouds of dust bound for Kansas and Nebraska.

Here, at 110 degrees for days on end, with no rain in sight, every creek a bare trickle and each river long hidden underground, we confront the ghost of Tom Joad. John Steinbeck’s stark and unerring capture of our often marginal existence invokes an essence that still stirs in the heart of every Okie who shades her eyes against the scorching sun, searches the bleached sky for hope and answers and then moves on. More than I can explain, this is who I am.

Perhaps my grandfather’s age-honed observations have merit. He says there is a reason white civilization has persisted here for just over a hundred summers: Oklahoma’s routine presentation is deceptive as the Siren’s call. Ten seasons may seem green and easy when the truth is flat, harsh, dry and well-cast in the fires of hell.

Outside today at 3:00 pm in Oklahoma City, the temp hovering brassily around 112, I realized that even in the city, the parched and barren summer days replicate my country childhood. City locusts screamed in the heat of the day from short, stunted trees that remain green only because their roots run deep to tap into the Earth’s blood. City or country, that is the sound of deep summer here. The smell of it is simple and also not bound by location. Prairie heat simmers with the death of the hope of a dangerous Spring. It smells of careless weeds sapped of water and randomly sacrificing themselves to the strident sun. Even in the city, summer is tinged with the odor of too-warm shallow water and brown grass gone dry and reclusive. These sights and smells are Oklahoma. Surviving another dead season somehow makes a promise of better times ahead.