The cold of the desert in winter, Phoenix, Arizona


When people think of the desert, they think of heat, not cold. And while it doesn’t get Minnesota cold in the Phoenix area, it does get cold. If you were able to sleep in, which I haven’t been able to do for years now, you wouldn’t notice. It’s the first week of December here in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix and while it will get into the 70s during the day, it was 41° when I woke up.

Nowadays, of course, people in Phoenix live in comfortable bubbles. Their homes are heated, and air-conditioned, as are their cars, but it’s on mornings like this that I think about old-time Phoenix, and what it felt like back then. And it makes me grateful that I can visit in my imagination, embraced by modern comforts.

Time-travel with me back to the days of Phoenix before all of these comforts were taken for granted. It's December, and while it's not as cold as, say, Flagstaff, it's colder than most people nowadays would feel comfortable out in. It's 41 degrees.
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
If we were rich, we might have a car. Of course, when cars were first invented, they didn't have roll-up windows, or heat, but at least we'd not be out in the cold, on a horse, or sitting in an open trolley car. Yes, it'll be warmer later today, but right now that desert wind is cutting through us like a knife. And we're not rich, and we don't have a car. Not many people in Phoenix do. We just got off the trolley, and we're walking.

41 degrees isn't fatal, like sub-zero temperatures would be, but it hurts like crazy. The heavy clothing we have on isn't the "high tech" stuff that would be invented in the 20th Century. Our coats are extremely heavy, made of leather, and since we're walking quite a bit, it's a lot of weight to carry. No lightweight nylon yet! And there are no zippers, just buttons, and the wind cuts through. Ouch!

Oh darn, I just stepped in a puddle. The streets aren't paved yet, and now my leather boots are soaked. Waitaminute, it hasn't rained for a long time, where did that puddle come from? Oh yeah, now I see the horse over there. I wish I hadn't.

I can feel the sunshine now, and it's going to be warm. This is Phoenix, after all! By summertime I'll be complaining, but now it feels good. I have a flask of whiskey in my pocket, and that makes me feel a little better, too. Any for you? No? OK, let me know if you change your mind. How about if I put my arms around you? You're shivering. There, that's better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Learning to drive in the 1970s

Image
Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...
Read more