The Heat Is Back in Central Texas

The heat is back in Central Texas, and this time it looks like it’s going to stay.

The heat’s come late this year. I think. I don’t know when the heat’s supposed to come, but I’ve been told it’s a July-to-September thing. Of course, it can always be hot, especially relative to the national mean, but The Heat is a thing unto itself, a 100-degrees-every-day-and-not-a-cloud-in-the-sky thing, and my impression from my two and soon three summers here so far is that it lasts from July through September, roughly, before we move on to what passes as autumn.

It feels odd for it to come so late, arriving in Austin just days ago, really. It’s dissonant, the truest form of summer arriving just days before the city starts to fill back up. The city and the land aren’t synchronized in their seasons, and this fractures those seasons so hardly any two months are legitimately alike. But for a few more days, it will be summer’s summer, the purest summer we get in a summery place, and it’s a comforting few days in its timelessness, its regularity. We’ll roast, of course, but one should roast in a Texas summer.

My first Texas summer was a brief one, just a long weekend: my first remembered trip to Texas. I’d been to San Antonio as hardly a toddler, but I didn’t make it back for the next twenty years, until I drove in one day in mid-July, coming down from Oklahoma and passing right on through Dallas-Ft. Worth on my way to Austin. I came in as the sun was setting. My brother and I went to Güero’s and the Continental Club. The next day I walked to the Bullock Museum and I roasted, and the day after that we sat in the pool all afternoon after a morning crawl through Lockhart and we roasted, and the day after that we grabbed brunch somewhere on the East Side after accidentally going to a Spanish Mass and we roasted, and then I drove west, west across Texas, west towards New Mexico, and the Hill Country turned to West Texas and as it did I saw a truck smashed against a bluff in the median and I listened to some poor rookie for the Cardinals get shelled in his major league debut on the radio, and a yellow sign told me to watch for rattlesnakes at a dead-empty rest stop and I turned off the interstate in Fort Stockton and ate the last of some fudge a friend and I’d bought at the Biltmore two weeks prior in the parking lot of a gas station Subway, and then I drove to Pecos while the sun set over the Guadalupe Mountains, which look purple in my memory, and I remember thinking those mountains looked dusky and mazed and swallowing, like a place to hide.

But before I left Hill Country, I stopped at the HEB in Fredericksburg, and the birds there were all walking around with their mouths open and waiting out the day under parked cars, and I’d never seen grackles before so I worried about them, and I poured a little water on the pavement for one not knowing if it could even drink it from the pavement like that, and it was yet another moment in which the massive scope of this country is so evident looking back at it, looking back at how foreign it felt to a well-traveled Midwesterner.

The heat is back in Central Texas, and this time it looks like it’s going to stay.