My wife and I recently took a trip to Buffalo, N.Y., to visit my sister on her 80th birthday. It was a great visit – Audrey and I have kept in close contact throughout most of our lives – even though she’s never lived anywhere else but in Western New York and I’ve lived anywhere BUT there from the time I joined the U.S. Navy in 1968.
As I say, it was a great family visit, but I want to tell you about the trip back to central Indiana.
As you are well aware, we have had a heat dome sitting on a good-sized part of the Eastern USA since last Sunday. Temps have risen into the 90s in Ohio and Indiana, making for some very uncomfortable circumstances for many people. More than once I have felt glad I am no longer working outdoors on these torrid days, having spent 17 years as a mail carrier in Noblesville until I retired in 2003.
The saving factor against any heat discomfort for most of us is air conditioning, which was invented by Willis Carrier in 1902. Created in Buffalo, Carrier’s first A/C units controlled humidity and temperature in a printing company in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the heat was shrinking and curling the printing paper, making it impossible to do quality printing. As you know, his invention caught on, and in 1915, he founded the Carrier Corporation.
Now almost everywhere is air conditioned – our homes, our work places, where we shop and go for entertainment, and our cars. That is, until it doesn’t work.
That’s what happened to us on our road trip home.
All was cool and perfect on our I-90 leg from Buffalo to the PA border. There is a rest stop as you enter the state, and we needed to stop. After returning to the car, we found as we drove away that the A/C was suddenly blowing warm air. No amount of knob-turning or button pushing could get the thing to do its job and we wound up having to open all the windows to keep from sweltering inside the car.
Even 88-degree blowing air was better than oven-like temps in a closed car. Problem was, it rushed in at 70 mph since that was the speed we were expected to drive. That’s a powerful blast, a constant blast, a noisy blast. But we had no alternative, on a Sunday, in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, not even sure what was wrong with the A/C.
Given all that, it is not the miserable heat that I wish to pursue here. Moving down the highway, on our five-hour trip to Columbus, where we were spending the night, my wife and I began to reflect and talk – albeit in loud voices over the noise of the rushing outside air – about how air conditioning has spoiled us. We’re kind of addicted to it. We seek it. We must have it.
We talked about the old days of our youth when there was no A/C in our cars or our homes. You might catch some cool relief at a department store, or at the movies. But that was a big exception to the norm. My home was hot. My dad tried to at least move the air along through the house with a simple but ingenious fan system. But we ate, played, cooked, and slept in heat that would not be thought of as tolerable today.
The same with travel. My sister and I sat in the back seat (without seat belts, but that’s another story) and gladly endured the rush of air through the open windows. Now, I don’t remember my dad ever driving along at 70 mph back then – so the rush was a bit softer than this weekend’s barrage of hot air – but, it was all we had. Cooling off in the car was a somewhat brutal exercise. Being hot was just the normal way things were back then.
I even thought about the people who lived before there were even fans or electricity. They had to endure heat without knowing any solutions, save for swimming. Women wore long dresses and men had similar covering to endure. They lived through it somehow – there were no options.
Nowadays, people are born into an A/C world and you cannot really blame them for their need for it.
When our A/C went out on the road, it was especially awful due to the addiction we have to being cool. No way am I going to change that need. You can bet the car’s A/C will be repaired as soon as is possible.
Ken Klingenmeier is known in the pages of The Reporter for his reviews of local theater productions in the Greater Indianapolis area, which you can read on his blog, A Seat on the Aisle. He also occasionally opines on other topics.