The dog days of summer

Spring is still in the air for Northern Nevada. While the afternoons reach a warming 80 degrees, it’s still possible for it to get down into the 30s at night. Summer is coming, though, that time of year when Northern Nevadans wish they could pant the heat away from their scorching brainpans.

It sure gets hot here. Think of the poor dog, left out in the pickup truck—not even a child for company. The temperature inside your vehicle on an 85-degree day will skyrocket to 102 degrees in 10 minutes, even with the windows cracked. After half an hour, 120 degrees is possible. On a 90-degree day, temps in that car can reach 160 degrees in the time it’d take you to run into the cantina and knock down a cold, frosty libation. And we see a lot of 100-degree days.

Man. That’s. Hot.

Even if you’re out in the sun for a moment—stooping to pull a weed out of that row of beets, perhaps—the sweat begins to pour from your pores, like ants stream out of an anthill when disturbed by a overwrought 4-year-old. It accumlates into drops and then pools and then, in one moment of blessed coolness, it trickles down your side, irritatingly ticklish. But dogs only sweat through the pads on their feet.

Gosh. Killer hot.

You can see it radiating from the blacktop parking lots, distorted air undulating like Fawn down at the Men’s Club—yeah, she’s hot, too. The heat is transparent, but the waves crawl up your body, encapsulate you, fill your lungs with searing cotton; you can’t breathe, can’t move, not even to shift into the shade. It’s a blast from a 400-degree oven, but instead of a nice chocolate-chip cookie, you’re going to get served a wave of nausea: heat stroke. Your knees buckle. Your hands fry on the pavement, that same pavement that Fido walks on in his bare feet.