How are we coping with the heat?

One of the first questions everyone asked me after I arrived in Tucson was: "So, how are you coping with the heat?" And my answer was....well, I guess I don't know anymore what my answer was. But here is what it should have been: "What do you mean how am I coping with it? Nobody here is coping with it, all you do is going from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned office and back. You should see Vienna in a heat wave!" As I write this, temperatures indoors and outdoors have just about dropped below 30 C, and it is 9:30 pm. Today's afternoon temperature was just around 38 C (100 F) and I was lucky: I had a cool basement laboratory to flee to, while other people went about their usual business on the surface: serving coffee, paving roads, showing apartments to people, sitting at office desks in 4th floors of west-facing buildings, without the luxury of a schedule flexible enough to move their work to a more protected place.

Very few places have air conditioning here. Some cafes and restaurants and a number of our laboratories do. My boss has a noisy, not very effective movable unit in her office. The gold broker next doors to cafe Milano does, but cafe Milano does not, and neither do most offices and apartments. So how do we cope? While in Tucson, from the perspective of a culture in which air conditioning is ubiquitous and overused, and a room temperature above 76 F (24.4 C) is deemed unacceptable, I started to wonder, too: how do the Viennese cope? How did I cope?

I guess, now that we are at the peak of a heat wave, my answer is threefold: First, we know that there won't be 5 months of it. This is by far the most important coping mechanism. We are expecting a temperature drop by 15 C this weekend, it's the main topic of conversation and everyone's silver lining. Second, we get used to it. Humans get used to a lot, and a few hours of 32+(90+) temperatures don't feel that bad when you are already used to a baseline of 28 (82). This is a chance you don't get living and working in Tucson. Third.....I don't know actually how some people cope. I don't know how the construction workers and kebab stand people (next to that grill all day!) and tram drivers cope. I don't know how old or sick people cope, because this is plenty exhausting for healthy, young people. I also don't know how I would cope if nighttime temperatures were to rise by a few more degrees.

I know how I cope in daytime: In 5 years of life in the desert including bike commuting, plenty of hiking and camping trips (including such follies as Death Valley and Grand Canyon in July), some semi-successful desert gardening attempts, and two years in a place with a swamp cooler, I have learned a few things about heat. One, it is cumulative. It makes a difference whether I spend a few hours in a cool cellar or not, it even makes a difference whether I make an effort to walk on the shady side of the streets during the day or not. There is a big difference between 32 C (89 F), 35 C (95 F) and 38 C (100 F), it's not just "all hot" (which was my pre-Tucson take on it). Which means, when it's 26 in the morning, and will be 35 in the afternoon, I close the darn windows. I am lucky enough to have an office in one of those older buildings with 0.5-meter thick walls, and my office stays quite bearable, as long as I close the window by 11 am or so. If I didn't know my pre-Tucson self, I would find it quite incredible that it has not crossed everyone's mind that opening a window may actually warm up a room, and that not every breeze is cool. But I know that I kept windows open as a default in past Viennese heat waves, and I see a lot of open windows everywhere these days, presumably causing lots of needless suffering.

Do I like the idea of a Vienna filled with noisy A/C units the way Tucson is? Not really. I had my fair amount of noise problems with them in the spacious desert Southwest, I don't think it is a good idea for densely built-up Vienna. It would be a great relief for a few days here and there - but people get lazy and in no time, they'd be running like they are in Tucson: all day, every day, out of convenience (I swear, there are people in Tucson who never stop using their compressor, but simply switch from heating to cooling sometime in March), no more getting used to any level of heat, living with a constant mechanical hum. Should I write about the warming climate here and what it will do to those "few days here and there"? Probably not, that'll turn into a whole other entry (and a side research project).

Life in Tucson, in contrast, would be very, very tough without any cooling. Without it, the town would simply not exist in its current size. The few days of Tucson-style heat we get here do get me thinking about life in Tucson 50 or 100 years ago. I look at the thick walls in old Viennese houses with green inner courtyards that are just a couple degrees cooler than the street and think about adobe buildings and what the urban landscape of the Old Pueblo might have been when it was actually old. I see people here at 4 pm, sitting in some corner, panting, with a fan blowing onto them, and I wonder what the diurnal rhythm of work and rest may have been in old Tucson. It must have been a few very hardy people, who lived there. The monsoon still means so much to people now, what must it have meant back in the day! Forget all the gun-waving horseback-riding movie heroes. This is how I imagine the Wild West: a lot of early mornings, a lot of hard work before sunrise, a lot of energy used just dealing with the afternoon heat, and, at all times, hoping for rain.

Bicycling

My first bike in Tucson, with resting white-winged dove.

One of the first things I did in Tucson, in July of 2007, was buying a bicycle. I could not see myself "going native" and commuting by car every day, and my boyfriend at the time, a native of the Pacific Northwest, couldn't see it either. The Ordinary Bike Shop sold me an old-style (but new), black cruiser, which looked, so people told me, "very European", and sported features like a kickstand and fenders, things that were inexplicably rather uncommon in Tucson. I immediately got another piece of equipment which is, in my understanding, an essential necessity for a bike, but proved utterly useless: a bell. It was useless, because off campus, there were not enough pedestrians to ever even need to make use of it, and on campus, most everyone seemed to never have heard of bells being on bicycles, so nobody reacted to it in the appropriate way (which is: realize they are walking on the bike lane and get the hell out of there). Other than the resulting near-collisions, the daily commute to university was really nice: long enough to get the circulation going, but short enough I wouldn't die on a summer late afternoon, and, I found, very good for my general well-being. 

My lucky raffle ticket

A couple of years later, I got my second bicycle (more precisely, I won it with a $2 raffle ticket I paid $1.85 for, because that was all the cash I had on me at the time): a fast, light street bike in my favorite color that was a little too small for me. In spite of fighting a little with its small size, I loved how light and fast it was. Speeding down Mountain Avenue's broad bike lane overtaking everyone, and then slowing down to turn into my street like on a highway exit was one of my daily joys. 

After the breakup with my boyfriend, which also meant a breakup with the car, I came to rely completely on these two bicycles, and learned the following things: 1. It is much better to own two bicycles, when that's your only means of transport. You do not always have the time or means to repair things, so it is nice to have a second bike to fall back on. 2. In a city like Tucson, you can do a lot of things by bicycle - but not everything. For some things, you need friends with cars. This may sound like a disadvantage, and it is, if your shopping list for the night involves 5 big flower pots, several gallons of potting soil, a six pack of microbrews, toilet paper, washing powder, and a takeout dinner at Nico's Tacos. But socially, it is an advantage: "depending" on other people for little services and returning favors to them with the means you have means connecting with them. I am convinced that taking your own car alone everywhere can make you very lonely. Two of the people I met in Tucson and got to know through shared car rides ended up being my best friends there. One of them I sold my fast bike to - she had relied on her only bike for years, and let me convince her that that second bike really makes life easier. The other became my husband. 

When leaving Tucson, I also parted with the first bicycle, since it was heavy and had only three gears, and Vienna has hills. I wasn't even sure about biking in Vienna. Tucson is easy. Yes, there are drivers who act as if they had never seen a bicycle. But, there is plenty of space for everyone and their road stupidity. It almost never rains, snow is a once-in-5-years event, ice and slush are unheard of, and the heat, well, you learn to cope with it. And once I discovered the green goo that seals tiny pinholes in inner tubes, even the cactus stingers lost much of their horror. What I knew of Vienna was what I remembered: fighting for survival on crowded streets between tram tracks and opening car doors, bike lanes ending without warning in shared lanes with everything that's dangerous, insufficient parking, bike theft. Biking was a sport, but not a commuting option competitive with public transport. 

source: http://images.travelpod.com/

I was very wrong. Even on my first bike ride in Vienna, on a snowy spring evening, terrified and freezing on technically the same bike I had left to my brother in 2007 (5 1/2 years and two accidents later, so many parts had been replaced that I did not recognize it), I quickly realized that things had changed. The bike route across Südtirolerplatz was unexpectedly straightforward, and did not even involve using a pedestrian crosswalk. There were clearly designated bike lanes, and even special small bike traffic lights, at the appropriate eye level. I was impressed. 

I am still impressed. Vienna has become a very bike friendly city and biking is clearly encouraged. (That's what a green party in the city government does, I guess.) To be sure, there are more things to worry about than in Tucson: For starters, there is just simply a lot less space on every road. For everyone. In streets originally designed for pedestrians and a few horse-drawn carriages, there are cars, parked cars, pedestrians, tourists (an especially inattentive class of pedestrian, so I mention them separately), many other bikers (I have been in slow bike traffic on Margaretenstrasse, no jam yet, but not too far from it), buses, trams, their treacherous tracks, motorbikes, trucks, construction sites, dogs, and, yes, still a few horse-drawn carriages (I was not so sure about approaching a horse on a bike the first time I was in the situation, but turns out they are rather unphased, by anything). There are plenty of potentially dangerous setups, so, you have to pay attention and bike defensively. (On a related note, I am baffled how many people here bike without helmet.) But the infrastructure has improved so much that bike commuting has become viable, and faster than public transport on my current route. There is lots of new bike parking, there are bike lanes where I couldn't even envision them (Margaretenstrasse is a miracle of efficient use of space), and drivers generally seem to be mindful. I dare to say that if bike theft is common, it's probably because people are extremely casual with locking their bike and the kinds of locks they use. (I hope I didn't jinx anything here.)

A particularly nice thing about my commute is that a good part of it is not even in the described mayhem of road users: it's a relaxing non-stop ride on the beautiful wide path between rows of trees on Ringstrasse. One of the best things about biking there: people know what a bell is. I just ring and watch them jump.