A survival guide to this year's heat apocalypse in Phoenix, Arizona

It’s been fascinating watching national media report on Phoenix and its consecutive days of above-110-degree heat.

“Burning pavement, scalding water hoses: Perils of a Phoenix heat wave,” screamed a Washington Post headline.

“In triple-digit heat, Monkey bars singe children’s hands, water bottles warp and seatbelts feel like hot irons,” reported The New York Times.

“Devoted runners strap on headlamps to go jogging at 4 a.m., when it is still only 90 degrees, come home drenched in sweat and promptly roll down the sun shutters. Neighborhoods feel like ghost towns at midday, with rumbling rooftop air-conditioners offering the only sign of life.”

Phoenix has been like this for years

I’ve been enduring Arizona summers off and on since my family first moved here in, I think, 1962 or was it ‘63?

In that time, I can’t remember one of those summers when the seatbelts (and the steering wheels and dash) didn’t feel like the hot end of a branding iron and the Monkey bars didn’t singe hands.

I was climbing Squaw Peak (now Piestewa Peak) at 5 a.m. every morning when Huey Lewis and the News were cutting “Hip to be Square.”

Like now, it was too damned hot to hike during the day, so an entire community of people would see each other only in the trace light of those summer mornings.

Even so, we got to know one another by first names and even snagged invitations to weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport was grounding airplanes in the heat wave of 1990 — when temperatures hit 122 degrees and in subsequent heat waves since.

As The Arizona Republic’s Richard Ruelas would report in 2018, the planes actually could have taken off, but were adhering to safety standards that were exceedingly cautious.

That doesn't mean the city shouldn't exist

The reader comments in the national newspapers this week have been fun to read:

“Time to get away from fossil fuels, and maybe have fewer kids,” wrote one Washington Post reader.

And another:

“Phoenix is a city that should not exist: not enough water, deadly heat, no shade trees, massive dust storms. And yet, development is booming, golf courses abound, sucking up the last of the underground aquifers to make the grass green. How incredibly stupid. It will be a ghost town within 10 years.”

Oh, yeah, Dear Reader. Meet me here in 10 years on the back nine at Grayhawk. I don’t play golf, so you’ll win.

Tribes thrived here for a millennium

Do you understand that ancient tribes were the first to inhabit what is today metro Phoenix?

In this same arid clime they built one of the most sophisticated canal systems of the ancient world that included the Southwest and central and South America — the sprawling civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas.

Before Columbus reached the shores of North America, our Indigenous people were cultivating as much as a quarter-million acres of the now-Phoenix basin with corn, beans, squash and cotton.

Yeah, they didn’t have the urban heat island you get when you lay concrete and asphalt on the desert floor, but the summers were hot as hell and eventually their desert civilization would disappear.

After a thousand years.

Long enough to impress any ancient Roman or Macedonian.

Yes, you have to be smart in our heat

Yes, our heat is nothing to take lightly.

As reported, roughly 500 people a year die from heat-related causes in metro Phoenix. Many of them are elderly or homeless or strung out on fentanyl.

In heat like this, you can lose the life force quickly, and infirmity or dysfunction put you at enormous risk

I’ve personally written a half-dozen columns and editorials over the years warning Phoenicians and our visitors not to get cocky when our temperatures reach triple digits.

You don’t have to go very far on a trail on a summer afternoon to reach an internal body temperature from which you cannot be saved, even with ice packs and cold water.

But if you’re watching from afar, this ain’t our first rodeo. Arizona long ago acclimated to these 110-plus degree days that now average 27 per summer.

We've planned for this. We've acclimated

Over the past few decades as we’ve watched our neighbors in Southern California, blessed with Mediterranean climate and brisk ocean breezes, endure occasional power overloads and outages, our air conditioners have been humming.

Why? Because we have a much finer margin of error.

“This is what we plan for — it’s the core of what we do,” Justin Joiner, APS vice president of resource management, told The Republic’s Russ Wiles. “Making sure the energy is there when customers need it.”

But what of the roofers and framers who work outdoors?

Nobody knows the Arizona heat like they do, and no one knows better how to adjust to the season with early starts and early finishes and lots of ice and hydration in between. They’re as tough as the 2 billion year-old mountains that surround them.

Basically, summer is Phoenix's winter

If you live in Minneapolis or Rochester, N.Y., and you want to know what it’s like for most of us slogging through this year’s Phoenix heat wave:

Do you have central air?

Well, so do we.

It's hot: How Phoenix plans to deal with summer heat

Do you look out your window and see rabbits and other small vermin instantaneously combust?

Well, neither do we.

Do you drive past playgrounds that are empty in the summertime?

No? Well, we do. And you’ll understand. This is our winter. This is when our kids get stuck indoors and get cabin fever.

Cabin fever shaped Spielberg. It's not bad

Arizona cabin fever is lousy, but it has its upside. In the early 1960s, one of our Phoenix kids who then went by the name “Steve” Spielberg had to spend the hot season indoors.

“I can remember spending summer afternoons, when it was miserable outside, in Steven’s room listening to soundtrack albums,” his childhood friend Bill Hoffman told Joseph McBride, author of “Steven Spielberg: A Biography.”

Spielberg was fascinated by film and its multimedia qualities, and in particular film music. At that time he loved the British film director David Lean, so I’m guessing he had the soundtrack to “Lawrence of Arabia.”

He definitely had the soundtracks to the “The Great Escape” and Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” as recounted by McBride. He had dozens and dozens of albums he listened to and absorbed.

Combined with his mother’s love of music and her exceptional talent for classical piano, Spielberg grew up with an ear for music and especially the cinematic soundtrack.

His collaborator for 50 years, the composer John Williams, who still has his own well-marked personal parking spot at Spielberg’s headquarters at Amblin Entertainment at Universal Studios in Hollywood, recently told NBC News:

“(Spielberg’s) a lover of film music. When I met him, he was young — 23 years old — and he knew more about film music than I did. He could remember subordinate themes in films that I had scored that I had already forgotten.” 

Spielberg the boy was preparing in those god-forsaken summers to be a motion-picture director. He was doing what all Phoenicians do. When the outdoor air feels like a blast furnace on our face ...

We adapt.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix heat is intense, but calm down: It's not an apocalypse