summer

Friday Firesmith – Summer and September

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As a teenager, I worked in the fields during the summer, and heat was never an issue. After working under the sun for a month, all heat feels the same, all humidity is normal, sweat is the uniform of the day, and sundown is quitting time.

This prepared me for working on the road, in triple digit heat, with asphalt that’stwo hundred fifty degrees as it comes out of the spreader. Get close enough to the asphalt and even the gnats will leave you alone.

Working on bridges usually meant there was water, but those structures that spanned overflows or just large holes that sometimes heldwater, it was like being in the bottom of a well with a heat lamp positioned over it.

Heat in South Georgia, for the better part of my life, simply was.

September is here, and last year it didn’t cool off for most of the month. This year, the first days of September have gifted us with temperatures in the mid to upper sixties, and it is heaven.

I did some limb cutting to get debris away from the fence the Big Pine fell on. And then I had to replace the fence. I started early in the morning and worked until noon. The heat nearly got me. The first part of August is unkind, to say the least, and at sixty-five, I feel my age more and more the higher the temperature rises.

Through the years, the new hires got younger and younger, and softer and softer. The generations raised on the inside of houses, nestled comfortably with their screens and air conditioning, were not accustomed to working outside in the heat, and some could not. Some would not. Management began allowing employees to sit in their truck with AC and cell phones, while work went unobserved. Being out there in the heat with the work was the only way to learn how its done, but the younger generation wanted only to stay out of the heat.

In good truth, theywere never trained to endure. I’ve watched grown men in their early twenties panic when they’ve been in the heat for too long. I’ve had employees quit rather than sweat. I’ve seen men who claimed they’ve played football in high school go home from work because they were too hot.

I went a few months without a work truck at one point. I had someone drop me off at the asphalt plant with my lunch cooler, I would catch the first truck out at six in the morning, then catch the last truck back in at seven in the evening. Someone would pick me up and take me back to the office, and by the time I got home I had time to eat supper, take a shower, and go to bed.

They forgot me one night, and I had to walk to a payphone and call for a ride to come get me. The guy that forgot me had gone out drinking so when he finally arrived he was almost too drunk to drive. After that incident, they got me a truck. It had a hole in the floorboard and didn’t have air conditioning. But it was a ride.

September. Cool breezes and nice sunrises. And the memories of summer, easing into the past again.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Summer of 2025

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It’s with great difficulty I come to terms this summer is less than a week old. My plants

are dying from the heat. That’s the bad news. The good news is the water from the previous two

years is finally drying up. The pond is going with it. That would be the body of water that for the

last twenty-five years has been a body of weeds.

All over America the heat is rising. Roads are buckling under the heat, and Interstates are

closing due. They’ll have to do the repairs at night I imagine. I spent twenty-seven years doing

bridge and highway work, and it’s brutal in this sort of weather to try to work.

In 1997, we hit a spell where it was brutally hot but this was in August. They sent a

nineteen-year-old new hire out to learn a few things from me, and the first thing he learned was

we were not going to sit in the truck. We had shit to do.

This guy had poked fun at me for a while for being “old.”

He bragged he could put up with the heat much longer than I could, and when I got out of

the truck, and took the keys with me, he wasn’t daunted. After about an hour he had drank all the

water he brought with him. He was sweating, but still not giving in. About an hour later, he

wanted to sit in the truck and cool off. I told him he had to do ten pushups for every minute he

spent sitting in the AC. I did fifty. I told him I was going to check on a few things and I would be

back soon. I walked away. He freaked out.

An hour later he was in full panic mode. Three hours in direct sunlight next to an asphalt

operation and he was wilting. He wanted to call someone in the office to come get him but cell

phones hadn’t taken over the world yet. He tried to get the contractor to let him sit in his truck

and no.

Red faced and not sweating anymore, I was getting worried about him. He told me he

quit and wanted me to take him in. I dropped him off at a pay phone and waited until I was sure

someone was on the way. He looked bad.

When I got back the asphalt crew had quit. Not finished for the day, but mutinied. Out of

twelve men, ten of them had gotten into the work van and left. It was three in the afternoon. I

stopped by a bridge project and got into the water with my work clothes on. Spring Creek is cold

and clear and I soaked for a while.

The young man went back to the office and told them I was horrible and had tortured

him. When I got back, clothes already drying, I told them he had quit, and refused to work. They

didn’t so much as slap his wrist. Later, I found out the actual temperature was over 100 degrees

and the heat index over 110.

They don’t make teenagers like they used to. But the heat is getting worse every summer.

Take Care,

Mike