The ‘Straight & Narrow’…
I had a religious experience of sorts not long ago! Yep, while sitting at a stoplight with sweat pouring out from under my helmet and not a stitch of dry fabric to be found anywhere on my body… It occurred to this weary traveler that if ‘Hades’ is merely no worse than east Texas during a heat wave with extreme humidity, it is nonetheless absolutely to be avoided whatever it takes! I reflected upon many of the times I’ve strayed from the path so clearly delineated to me by parents, preachers, and the like… I’d right then repented profusely, pitifully, and I’d shamelessly and desperately attempted to make my peace!
I did finally find some relief when I got to my motel room, cranked the A/C down to the ‘artic’ setting, moved a chair directly in front of the vents, disrobed, and… Ahhhhh! Salvation! Strangely, while enjoying the cooling air vigorously doing its work, I recalled an opposite experience. I thought about the time in that isolated drafty little guard tower on a lonely hilltop along the perimeter fence late one night in Korea in the dead of winter… and of trying to make sense of it all… “Can it really be this cold?” I’d asked myself. Was I somehow imaging all of that, or…? We struggle sometimes to grapple with extremes, particularly new ones to us…
I’ve long held a special fondness for Texas… Far more than just a clever cliché, it truly is a state of mind! It is fascinating, diverse, rich in history, unique in its blending of many quite different cultures, expansively huge, and full of fabulous memories for this frequent visitor. Clearly, however, the weather there is not a draw this weak mortal finds irresistible…
I was once asked to describe the weather down yonder in the Republic… I thought for a moment, then replied… “It’s too, T-O-O. It’s always either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too windy or too still… But, if you average it all out, it is dang near perfect! Trouble is, it’s never actually average for longer than the blinking of an eye… It simply passes through average on its way from one extreme to the other…” In a way, I guess you could say what I’d just been experiencing was ‘normal’, typical, and expected… Oh well, the price of glory is high indeed…
I’d taken the room for two nights… one reason was for obvious convalescence purposes, but the other even more important was to allow expected rain to pass over us the next day. A ‘cold front’ was due to wander through, and that even held out the prospects of cooler temps to follow! ‘Cooler’ is a relative term, of course, particularly around there… It’s the difference between merely unbearable and oppressively prohibitive…
Well, I was there and I needed to be elsewhere in time, so… I was left with doing the best I could to pick and choose the best options available and extricate us from the gates of… that other hot place remarkably similar in at least one aspect to the one spoken of in Biblical texts. I found no comfort in learning none of the options available offered much improvement…
While there, I did surprisingly to even this pansy avail myself of an opportunity to exhibit great courage and considerable toughness. Naturally, some cynics would say it was only foolishness and a need to seek the approval of others… Whatever it was, though, since we were again in Paris, TX, it just seemed unimaginable that we had never visited the Eiffel Tower… The one in France, yes, but not the one in Texas.
Yeah, I’ve been through there many times over the years, even stayed overnight a couple of times in the past, but I’d somehow managed to not tick that item off my ‘To-Do list’… I had the time for that on this pass-thru, plus I had even received reliable-sounding directions to that famous landmark… Yep, all I had to do was face and overcome the extreme heat/humidity thing, and… so that’s where the courage and toughness assertions come in…
Eiffel Tower, Paris, TX…
Texas is like that, ya know. Once upon a time, MitchO and I had ridden the ‘Three Sisters’ and gazed in amazement upon a solitary giraffe standing in a paddock next to a barn… The day we visited the Eiffel Tower, come to think of it, we’d also passed a camel lounging lazily in another paddock along the way. I’m sure there are lions and tigers, probably an elephant or two, plus other exotic non-indigenous animals in private hands around also, but I’ve not seen any of them… yet… Heck, up in the Panhandle they even have the Cadillac Ranch! Gotta love a place with so many unusual surprises!
There is a popular Country & Western song that includes the lyrics, “If Heaven ain’t a lot like Texas, I don’t want to go…” Well, to that I would emphatically add, “If the weather in Hell IS a lot like that in Texas during the summertime, I sure don’t want to go there either!”
DDT
