Keeping cool when there's no AC

This summer has been a serial scorcher in these parts, and the last two heat waves have driven my air conditioners, one by one, to throw in the towel.

The first heat attack disabled my downstairs unit. That was inconvenient (and expensive), but not disastrous. The upstairs unit picked up the load and the entire house stayed reasonably comfortable.

The last assault took my upstairs unit out of action and converted our second floor into an oven. With temperatures soaring into the 90s in my office and the bedrooms, we've been forced to drag a queen-sized mattress downstairs into our living room while we await the arrival of a repair part for the ailing unit.

This is also forcing me to abandon my trusty desktop computer and compose this column on Miss Peggy's laptop, with its cramped keyboard and quirky manners, wihc is wyh you see mangled splelnig like this.

Each time I have to venture into the torrid upstairs, I think back to the days before central air became standard equipment in American dwellings and reflect on how we handled the heat waves back then.

Shady porches, pitchers of lemonade and oscillating electric fans were part of the solution. It was almost pleasant to go to sleep at night to the gentle drone of an electric fan, feeling its cooling breeze sweep back and forth across the bed.

Way long ago, when even electric fans were beyond the means of a sharecropping family, we would throw open the windows, spray smelly insecticide into the air and sometimes sprinkle the bedsheets with water to wrangle a little comfort from the night. The smell of the insecticide was almost as bad as the mosquitoes, and the water sprinkled on the mattress quickly lost its cool and became humidity.

Daytime offered more effective weapons. We had few places to go where men and boys were required to wear shirts, so backs and chests were exposed to the breeze. Women could wear sun suits or peasant blouses or even halters and shorts, if they weren't going into town. A pitcher of ice water was kept full in the refrigerator, after we were able to afford a refrigerator. Before that, we'd buy a 50-pound block of ice off the ice man's truck and stow it in the ice box, to be chipped away with an ice pick when we needed it for the iced tea.

There was a shade-producing chinaberry tree in each yard, and the shade offset any disadvantage attached to the berries, which tended to yellow, drop to the ground and become squishy beneath bare feet. In the open fields, you sweated beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat and drank copious amounts of spring water.

But the favorite weapon against the heat was the swimming hole. No modern-day cement-lined in-ground, chlorine-smelling, cabana-bordered backyard or country-club pool can match the pleasure of plunging off an overhanging limb into a deep hole where the creek has bent its course and created a relatively still basin.

The cooling comfort of that swimming hole was worth walking a mile or two down hot, dusty roads to reach it.

The smell was sweet, emanating from the herbs and flowers that lined the creek bank or covered the meadow.

For companions there were crawdads, mud puppies, minnows and a bug I remember as a miller bug. It was a small black or dark brown creature with an oval body. It skimmed across the surface of still water and could dive under if you tried to catch it - which, of course, we did. I rarely caught a miller bug, but it was fun to try.

Every Southern community had a swimming hole. In Graniteville, it was the Log Wash Hole on Horse Creek, the stream that provided power for the textile mills strung out between Aiken and Augusta. It flows through the middle of Graniteville.

The Log Wash Hole was the favorite of generations of boys. It lay across the railroad from Canal Street and in summertime was screened from public view by trees and other vegetation. Swimming attire was optional. You could wear cut-off dungarees, swimming trunks or nothing. The girls had their own wash hole and didn't bother to spy on the boys - at least to the best of my knowledge.

Kirk Bennett of Columbia, a graduate of Graniteville High School, swam in the Log Wash Hole a generation after I did, but his memories are similar: "Remember the smell of the creosote walking along the railroad tracks, crossing the canal, then down the path to the water?"

Ah yes, the cool smell of sweet memory.

From my office window now, I can see the broad, inviting expanse of Lake Hartwell, which straddles the state line between Hartwell, Ga., and Clemson. Less than a mile away is a public boat ramp where a body could wade into the cool water and defy the August heat.

But the sun is hot, and I am old, and the AC technicians could be here any second with the new part that will drive the heat from my upstairs.

And I'm just now getting the hang of this laptop.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson, SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.

Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who was graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.