Corn Sweat in the Seventh Circle

Meditations on heat as emergency

It’s hot here, of course. It’s hot everywhere. I only leave the AC to walk the dog, but without much walking, just lingering in one patch of shade then another.

Usually the best part of our walks is neighbors calling out in full Kentucky twang, Why is that Jo-oooolene? Sometimes she gets her song too.

Humblebrag, my dog is very popular.

Except today. The street is apocalypse-empty, silent until an AC compressor kicks on like a fighter jet.

Last June in Greece, we stayed in a top-floor Airbnb—landlocked in the Peloponnese with no AC, no cross breeze, just a rotating fan blowing hot air from one room another.

Trying to sleep under a cold soaked towel, I thought, This is it—this is the heat that’s coming.

When heat is inescapable, it’s an entirely different catastrophe. You’re no longer Dante passing through the seventh circle, but one of the miserable souls, blood-boiled up to your cheekbones.

Desolation of severe heat in Megalopolis, June 2024. Credit: Nuria Sheehan

Back in my climate-controlled American life, the reasonable-for-a-human temperature lulls me into ignoring how tenuous this comfort is, dependent on fragile grids. It’s so easy to forget the heat you just left.

And the language of heat doesn’t help us remember. On the news they’re talking about wet bulb temps. A cartoon lightbulb dotted red-hot with perspiration comes to mind. Cities are called heat islands—like unmoored metropolises circling the fringes of hell. And then, there’s the rural midwest, where you have to hear about corn sweat.

Corn sweat incarnate — headline from KMHO radio.

The heat of Greece crushed me with the most obvious revelation. In the climate collapse—which can feel as unreal as cartoon-eyed corn for those of us sheltered from the worst of it—none of us are just passing through.

Half-delirious after several sleepless nights, I told myself, I need to remember this heat. I’ll keep the AC off, I’ll learn to sleep through sticky-hot nights.

Of course I’m doing none of those things.

I take the dog back out once the sun sets and this time we see one other human, a woman out for an exercise walk. She, of course, stops to pet Jolene and we trade our inanities.

It’s so hot.

I can’t believe how hot it is.

So hot today. And tomorrow…

It’s so hot, I repeat, worrying my brain’s been boiled, all my words evaporated.

But then again, maybe we exchange these stupid words as incantations. We repeat this most blatant truth as a sort of protection against forgetting reality once we’re back in the spell of our climate-controlled houses.