An Ode to Heat

Anybody from the Northern Plains understands cold. We know what rosy cheeks and snow blindness are. We know the pain of having our fingers unthaw once we return inside from walking outside for five minutes with heavy gloves on. We know what it’s like to have icy eyelashes. We understand cold because a majority of our year isn’t warm. We rejoice when the sun shines, the snow recedes, and the warmth returns, but in this climate nothing too good can last for too long. The great plains are the war zone for mother nature to figure out her problems- specifically cold vs warm. No matter what- whether cold, wind, storms, heat, or anything else- we the people end up losing.

We forget about heat in honor of worrying about the cold. We all have a story of something outrageous happening on a cold day, but most of us also have a story from a hot day. I remember in high school on a hot summer day, we were cutting up fallen, dead trees at the farm and our water supply ran out. Sweating like pigs on a day with temperatures in the 90s, we decided to go grab some water from the local creek that filters into the Sheyenne River in southeast North Dakota. Fortunately for us, the water was cool and quite refreshing; unfortunately for us there were cattle upstream and we…uh…let’s say we learned our lesson.

I realized today that many of us up north really have no idea what heat is. In the winter we routinely bring our hands close our mouths and blow warm, moist air on them to heat them up. We can often see our breath floating away in the frigid air whenever we walk outside. Today when the temperature was in the 90s and the heat index was into the low 100s I had a thought worthy of revelation: when we put a thermometer in our mouth, we expect something around 98-99 degrees, which was close the air temperature and the air feel at the time. So I decided to hold my hand in front of my face and exhale, and in a moment that I had never experienced before, the air hitting my hand didn’t feel much different than the surrounding air. It was a weird magical moment where something I’ve always taken for granted opened up my eyes; such a small, insignificant idea that gets my brain going on a whole nother level. I don’t understand heat.

Not one hour earlier I was running out on the open gravel and trying not to die. The heat is suffocating because my body simply cannot cool down, and the treeless Great Plains countryside doesn’t offer any respite. My coach told me once that I must have good air conditioning, because I sweat A LOT; sometimes I’ll finish a run on a hot day and my shoes will be making squishy sounds, simply because my sweat has pooled up in my shoes and caused them to become soaked. It’s truly a wonderful life. It doesn’t take long for me to run out of dry spots to wipe off any sweat- I’m covered. It reminds me of a few summers ago when the temperature was again into the 90s and I was on the same gravel road, but this day I stopped sweating. Every quarter mile or so I had to stop and walk because my body was completely done with me, but I managed to make it back to camp, whereupon the food service manager looked at me, horrified. Apparently I was white as a ghost and still not sweating. This was my first and only experience with heat exhaustion; it took me two full days to rehydrate from that run.

I decided with the heat that I should not fight it, but learn instead to embrace it. With my current understanding of wind, I know that the more you fight it, the more you lose. If you use the wind and let it make you stronger, you can grow and become less bitter as a person. I sometimes get quite bitter at heat, so today I tried to simply be at peace with it. I surprised myself how much better this run went compared to any other high-heat runs I’ve done before. That’s how life is though, isn’t it? We push and shove against things totally and completely out of our control, when we could be instead learning from it and trying to make peace with it. I wish there was a word in the English language that could fully encompass this idea: it’s not fully peace because you are still struggling against something, but you recognize the potential that it can bring you and it therefore becomes a means of growth. It then becomes a different kind of peace that Christians know quite a bit about in our world. We know that sin abounds and can be easy to struggle and fight against, gaining no traction, but we also learn from it and learn peace from Jesus’ sacrifice for us. It’s this unique feeling of peace that I found while it was hot.

Because it was.