The hottest town on the planet earth is Princeton, Illinois. This is a fact. I have spent days there in heat that rivals any heat I have felt elsewhere, and by rivals I mean destroys it and renders it downright tepid. The hottest night of my life was not one, but many, spent, not coincidentally, in the world’s hottest town, Princeton. I can remember those nights, lying on top of sheets, staring at the ceiling of my grandmother’s house, following the cracks in the plastered ceiling that worked in concert to create a meaningless map to nowhere. Those nights, positioned in a makeshift bed in the room at the end of the hall, were pure hell, only hotter. The wind pushed at that old house, the house that my grandfather had been born in and died in, and the heat and weariness of those long sultry nights deceived my eyes into believing the plaster cracks were growing, spreading, seeking out the corners of the room and that, once there, the ceiling would collapse and leave me pinned to my sweaty sheets. If I were to have died that way on those nights, encased in a tomb of crumbled plaster, I do believe it would have been a relief.
But the ceiling never caved in on me, and the night wore on. I’d hear my parents snoring in the other bed. My brothers- I cannot remember my brothers on those nights- they must have been asleep, or quietly wishing that the ceiling would collapse and put them out of their misery as well. There were other nights in that house, hot nights, where I’d listen to baseball on the AM radio, hoping that the distraction would cause me to be cooled. The sheets were always stiff, starchy and itchy, and the humidity that might normally cause stiff sheets to rest was no match for the inferior thread count of these guest beds that hadn’t been used for decades, or generations. The room was still and everything not itchy was made sticky. Nothing was impervious to the heat and gummy humidity. Velvet would have been sticky in that room on those nights. Those nights of torture, where morning always came but only after hours that felt like days passed, are as fresh in my mind today as any memory I possess.
When we finally did awake, there was no cooling to be had. There was a creek, called a crick in that vernacular, and it was a ways down the narrow road that ran East to West, from somewhere, or nowhere, on the East to Princeton to the West. The crick was the only water to be found for miles and it held promise of a deeper, lasting cooling that might help us forget the night before and the night that lie ahead. My brothers and I floated down that creek one day, barely able to keep moving over the gravel and dirt that lined the stream bottom and the banks. We pushed with our hands and glided down as an alligator might slide from a sunny bank into tannic waters at the first sight of trouble. We pushed and slid and wound our way from upstream to the little bridge that allowed that old county road to run into Princeton. This seemed, at the time of the gliding, like a good idea. It was cool, we were wet, and water was what we all knew best. When the bridge came, and we scrambled up the muddy bank and past the filleted carcasses of catfish that someone else had caught a day or two before, we were greeted by the presence of leeches that had attached their revolting little faces to our skin. There were shrieks and there was much checking and squirming, and when that night came, there were nightmares to go along with the hellish temperatures and the silence of those dark rooms.
My parents own home borrowed a trait from my grandmother’s, and we lacked any effective air conditioning for most of my childhood. Worse than lacking air conditioning is an air conditioning system that doesn’t work well. If no air conditioning is present, one opens windows to their fullest, turns on fans to their highest, and maintains a cold, wet towel for brow wiping. This is the way you sleep, or try to, when it is unbearably hot out. But when an air conditioner is present, and theoretically operating, those windows are closed tight, allowing no breeze in, but also no slightly cooler air out. This was the problem in my parent’s home. The air was on, as I recall, but it never worked. So we’d all lie in our sweaty beds, praying for morning, breathing stale air and wishing the air conditioner would more easily take a degree or two off of the nighttime air. We begged and pleaded but 86 outside generally meant 84.5 in. I remember one night that was so still, so hot, and so humid, that I left my light on and tried to stay awake, convinced that attempting to sleep would be pointless and maddening.
This week, it is also going to be hot. So hot, in fact, that some people who work and live in areas without air conditioning are cautioned against doing so. So hot that the air itself is suffocating, and the presence of the sun magnifies the effects of the high dew point to unbearable, unhealthy levels. When it is this hot, I need only remember my childhood bedroom and my grandmother’s cracked bedroom ceiling and I find that I easily understand what it is I need to do. I’m heading to the lake. And when I arrive, I’m not just heading to it but into it, a baptism by necessity, into the 78 degree water that will chase away any heat, no matter how insulting and intense.
I woke up Sunday morning with a pounding headache. With my air conditioning set to a pleasant 71, my body hadn’t yet had a chance to absorb any of the heat that awaited outside my fir front door, but my brain knew what was coming. There was heat on the other side of that door, and of those walls and windows, heat so intolerable that my brain was already wracked with apprehension and succumbed to the pressure well in advance. I left the house, and my headache grew. I had an appointment, and I foolishly faux-jogged back to my car, a rush necessitated by the heat. The jostling of that quick run made my head ache even worse. I could feel each heartbeat above my eyes, in the front of my brain, and if I would have passed out then and been discovered by a good Samaritan minutes later, they could have skipped checking my pulse at my wrist and just watched my heart beat through my forehead. The heat was wreaking havoc on me, and the jaunt to my car left me feeling more like Mr. Chase in search of a gas station, though my pants were not yet strapped to my head.
I raced back to the lake, to be comforted by the water and the pier and the clean breeze. After an hour of this most holistic medication, like a switch, my headache was gone. The pressure subsided, my clarity returned. I maintained the regimen of resting and sipping and fanning and swimming, and the remainder of the day was a success. I determined that wet swimsuits will keep the temperature agreeable for no more than 30 minutes after any length of swim, so the process must be repeated, the swimming with the drying, for as long as one wishes to maintain a pleasant perch on a sturdy white pier.
This week, the news will tell you what to do. They’ll tell you to keep a fan blowing. Then they’ll ask that you stay hydrated. They’ll tell you to close your curtains during the day and open them at night. They’ll tell you all sorts of things, tips, tricks, to beat the heat. I will simplify these instructions for you, with one simple command. Get thee to the lake, post haste. Since I’ve already gone to great lengths to explain to you that Geneva is the lake, not a lake, it should be obvious that my decree is intended to bring you to Geneva. And if you’re reading this from Princeton, getting to the lake is less a matter of refreshment and more a matter of survival.