Nick Jimenez

You can love Texas and still hate the heat

Believe me when I say I love Texas. I love its sweeping beaches. I love its deep forests. I love the craggy limestone of the Hill Country. I love the sweeping horizons way out San Angelo way where I swear you could see New Mexico on a clear day. I love the small towns where you become a friend just by ordering a slab of barbecue on butcher paper.
   Oh yes, I could sing paeans on behalf of Texas. But just don't ask me to wax ecstatic in late July and August when the state falls into a fiery furnace. If Dante had come to Texas in these waning days of July and with the oven of August ahead, he would have written "The Inferno" with a ring of hell set aside just for South Texas.
   The temperatures this week all across the state had the monotony that makes the TV weatherman's job easy: hot and dry with no relief in sight. There were century marks in Austin, Cotulla, Del Rio, Fort Worth, Harlingen, Kingsville, Laredo and points beyond. (Heat is nothing new to Laredo; when it's 30 degrees in Corpus Christi, it's still about 85 in Laredo.)
   All across Texas, an unrelenting sun beat down like penance for a sin.
   A friend e-mailed me from up north recently. All it said was "How hot is it down there?" Damn him.
   The state symbol for August ought to be a sweat-soaked shirt. Or maybe a utility meter with the little wheel whirling so fast that it looks like a Las Vegas roulette wheel, except here the suckers always lose.
   We are into the kind of heat that makes people do crazy things, nutty stuff. Two reasonably sane men, Council members Brent Chesney and Henry Garrett, suddenly got the idea that they could cut a deal for Buc Days and Bayfest, alleviating those outfits of some of the costs of police and litter pickup during their annual shindigs. Maybe the two forgot that because they are so tied to the two organizations their favor would look downright suspicious. After a cold damp cloth on their foreheads (along with a timely news story and a finely wrought editorial), the two snapped out of it. But the heat will do that to you.
   Maybe it's the sweat trickling down the neck that makes folks irritable and hard to get along with.
   Take the county commissioners. Please. Mayor Loyd Neal, County Judge Richard Borchard and the county hospital district had almost worked out a deal that relieved the city of $1 million of expenses in its part of operating the city-county health department. But the commissioners, grousing something about disappearing tobacco funds (does anyone think cigarette sales will disappear?), nixed the deal.
   Again, city and county cooperation collapsed faster than an A/C compressor under duress.
   Wouldn't it be easier to get the city and county together just by sitting down for Sunday dinner at the Noyola family household, with Commissioner David passing the mashed potatoes to Council member Jesse?
   Too hot even to squabble
   The steamy temperature makes a body torpid. Maybe that's why we can't even work up a fuss about that Texas Senate redistricting plan that breaks up the Corpus Christi metropolitan area, lumping Nueces County into a senatorial district with Hidalgo County and San Patricio County into a district that runs clear to Webb County.
   In any scenario, their voters outnumber our voters. With enough bad luck and inattention, Corpus Christi area interests will be represented in the Texas Senate by residents of McAllen and Laredo. How much will they care about the port, beach erosion and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi? With heat mirages shimmering in our eyes, who cares at all?
   I will put the beauties of Texas against the poor pretensions of any other state any other time of the year. The glories of wildflowers blooming in a Texas spring will outdo the cherry blossoms in Washington anytime, and don't tell me that a crisp autumn day at the beach, those glorious pale blue skies over a wild beach, is less than any bunch of leaves in Vermont.
   But dear God, did you have to make it so hot in Texas in late July and August?
   Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787, or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com
  
  
  

 
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