NATURALLY SPEAKING by Steve Lekwa

Here I sit in air conditioned comfort thinking about the heat and how we cope with it. I'm old enough to remember life without that almost universal source of comfort that we find shelter in today. None of our neighbors had air conditioning, either, and it wasn't thought of as unlivable. It was just the way life was in the summer. We at least had electricity and a fan. Cars didn't have AC, either, and the only answer was keeping the windows open even on dusty gravel roads. Sometimes we held of driving until night on longer trips to avoid the worst heat.

Like some wild creatures, we had our places to escape. The basement could be damp and kind of musty, but it was relatively cool down there. It became our sheltered den deep underground on those days when it was just too hot to be active outdoors. There were shade trees above our sand pile in the back yard, too, and it always seemed a little better there under those old maples. A little plastic wading pool served as a place to splash cool water at each other and a good place to fill squirt guns. It served admirably for several years until the lure of a bigger water playground drew us to the river where we spent endless hours wading, swimming, building dams, looking for pretty rocks in the gravel bars, and netting bright colored small fish of several varieties that we kept in little stone holding pools. Riverside Bible Camp north of Story City opened its pool to the public several afternoons a week and that was always a treat.

Our immune systems must have been well exposed to any number of things as we played in the river. Sewer treatment was primitive by today's standards and nearly every farm had cows or sheep grazing the woodland pastures. The river was their primary source of water, and, like us, a cooling place to rest on hot afternoons. We didn't get sick from all we were exposed to that I can remember, and we ate the sunfish, bullheads, catfish, and even larger chubs that we caught, too. I do recall getting some kind of fungus infection that appeared like itchy sores from spending too much time playing in dirt piles left from digging the basement for our new house back in about 1958. The sand pile was still there under the old maples, but our toy dozers, tractors, and trucks didn't leave neat tracks in the sand like they did in real dirt. We dug our own basements, built roads, and forts sitting out there in the sun because the dirt piles offered a more creative landscape for our imaginations.

There was something to just keeping busy, too. When busy, you didn’t think about being uncomfortable as much. We had a large garden that always had some weeds to pull and something to pick. We lined up quite a few yards to mow when we were a little older and in need of spending money. Our little flock of sheep pretty much took care of themselves in the summer, but they needed occasional attention, as did the fences that were supposed to keep them in. Summertime fencing was a chore that was hard to enjoy. Not much air moved back in the woods along the river and the mosquitoes could be fierce. DEET hadn't been invented yet and what repellants we had soon sweated off. It's no wonder our fences sometimes had a rather random look to them. It was easier to just staple it to a tree somewhere near when you wanted it than it was to try to dig a straight line of post holes though all those roots. Nearly any old stump would do to get the job done so we could get back to more appealing things like wading in the river.

I'm not far from Indian Creek in Nevada as I write. Nevada's sewer plant is just a little way upstream, but its effluent is probably pretty clean compared to the river of my youth. I wonder if the neighbors would think me strange if I was found wading in the creek?