In her memoir Walk
Through Walls, Marina Abramovich describes the time she spent living among the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia (1). The summer heat in this area of the world home to Indigenous Australians is unimaginable to
me. Temperatures can sometimes rise up to one hundred and thirty degrees. Her
strategy for getting through such a day was very simple: don't move.
Boston's
mercury does not quite reach those levels. Still, a ninety degree day
is hot enough to leave careless Bostonians soaked in their own sweat.
Avoiding perspiration altogether is next to impossible and just limiting it
is (far, far) easier said than done.
One of the commonly seen
strategies involves moving quickly from one air-conditioned location to
another- the apartment to the subway train, the office to the sandwich
shop, the gym to the car. This is not a bad strategy if the travel time is short. However,
sometimes there is no choice but to walk outside for longer than two minutes. What to do now, hotshot?
My friend and I used
to face this challenge each week. We would walk from his apartment
toward his office and stop along the way for dinner. The time outside
was around ten minutes, just long enough for the heat and humidity to activate our sweat glands.
We tried different ways to keep
cool. Walking in the shade sometimes helped. At other times, we quickened our pace to 'beat the heat'. If the humidity was low or there
was a breeze, sometimes these tricks worked. But not always.
One
day, the temperature was almost ninety-five degrees. The humidity made
the air so thick it felt like we were wading through a swimming pool. We had no hope.
Right as we left, I came up with a
brilliant solution: walk slower. My friend was skeptical but we
had nothing to lose. And so we moved at a grandmother's pace through the
summer's hottest, stickiest day. When we finally arrived at dinner, we did so with
clean shirts and some sense of amazement.
Most importantly, we learned something: 'moving the body generates
body heat'. Who knew?
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Wrote about them somewhat controversially, you mean?
Bored readers are free to lookup their own articles about Marina Abramovich and the racism controversy drafts of this book sparked.
