Tales of the Southwest: When the Jackrabbit Sat in the Shade

By Grant McGee

                The Great American Southwest is being blasted by a heat wave right now:  120 in Phoenix, 113 in Tucson, 102 in Bisbee, 102 in Roswell, 95 in Clovis.  These are places I’ve been, places where I can imagine that kind of heat.

                The nightly news and the media outlets are making a big hoo-ha about the intense heat.

                This happens about every year.

                It’s nothing new.  I know, I used to live there and lived there in a number of Junes over the years.

                And again they’re reporting that It’s so hot that some planes that were supposed to fly out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport were grounded…their spec charts don’t cover temps that high.

                I didn’t hear anything about the tarmac returning to its original fresh asphalt state.

                Yeah, that was the summer of 1990 that that happened in Tucson.  Oh I’m sure it happened before and it’s happened since but that’s the first time I’d heard of it.  It was 120 degrees in Tucson and the tarmac at the airport was so hot that as the big passenger jets rolled across it the tires left rutty tracks on the taxiway and runway.

                I remember that summer because that was my first summer in The Great American Southwest, the first time I got to feel that “dry heat” everyone talks about so much in the region.

                Never felt it?

                Pre-heat your oven to about 300 degrees then after about 15 minutes put your face close to the front of your oven then open that door.  There’s a sample for you.

                That first Southwest summer I had a job as a country music disc jockey in Roswell, New Mexico.  I was making the princely sum of about $10,000 a year and supplementing my income by cruising the backroads around town on my bicycle, collecting cans and turning them in for, ahem, recreational refreshment money.

                It was June and the heat came.

                It was quite like something I’d never experienced before.

                And it was true, it was a dry heat.  It was hot but not a bothersome, smothering heat full of humidity.

                My groovy bachelor pad on the north side of Roswell came equipped with a “swamp cooler.”  If you live in The Great American Southwest you know about these wondermous devices.  If you don’t, I’ll explain:  It’s basically a giant-ass fan attached to the ductwork of your home, a little pump pumps water over fiber mats and the hot dry air is sucked through the wet mats and cooled down a bit.  It ain’t like refrigerated air but it’ll do.  Swamp coolers really don’t work in other parts of the country where there’s humidity.

                The temperature climbed day after day…

                It didn’t really bother me at 5 in the morning when I reported for work...the land had cooled down and the air before sunup was refreshing and cool. 

                It didn’t bother me at work because the radio station owners had sprung for a pretty decent air-conditioning system.  Even though there were scorpions crawling around in the light fixtures overhead it was a good place to be on a hot Pecos Valley day.

                And after work?  I’d return to my groovy bachelor pad on the north side of Roswell, flip on the swamp cooler, drop my duplex temp down from about 95 to 85, pour a quart jar about 1/3 full of dark rum, add ice, pour in a can of Diet Coke then sit around and listen to music.  Oh, and sometimes I’d lay in a lounge chair and watch the ant colony outside my front door, but that’s an entirely different story.

                It was also the summer I had no TV.

                And it continued to get hot.

                Then came the day that it got to 110 degrees in Roswell.

                I need to tell you something about Roswell if you’ve never been there.

                I lived there before the UFO-ologists got there and made a big to-do about the Roswell Incident of 1947 in which an alien spacecraft crashed northwest of the city.  When I lived in Roswell the big things there were cattle, oil and pecans…and a bus manufacturing plant that was set up at the old air base on the south side of town.

                Roswell is a sun-blasted city that sits in the high Chihuahuan Desert.  So I was not surprised by the high heat.  After all, I was in a desert.

                Anyway, then came the day that it got to 110 degrees in Roswell.

                I had gotten off the air and was getting ready to go record some commercials.  I noticed my buds Wayne and Don weren’t around.

                Wayne oversaw things on the country station, Don was the engineer…the Mr. Fix-it of all things radio at the station.

                Then I found them.

                They were out back having a smoke.

                I walked out into the blast furnace of the day.  Even at 1030 in the morning it was approaching 100 degrees.

                “It’s the time of year when the temperature has about the same numbers as the time,” Wayne observed one day.

                Wayne and Don were having their smokes and staring at one of the satellite dishes.

                I looked over at what they were staring at.

                I reckon less than 15 feet away from us was a jackrabbit sitting in the shade of the satellite dish.

                “He doesn’t care we’re here,” I said.

                “No shit,” said Wayne laughing.  “He’s hot.”

                “You reckon he’s got rabies?” I asked.

                “He’s hot, bro,” said Wayne.  “He’s hot, he found some shade and he doesn’t care that we’re standing here.”

                “Did you offer him a smoke?” I asked.

                “He’d probably eat it,” said Don.  “Waste of a good smoke.”

                I looked at the jackrabbit.

                “Whaddya think, little buddy?” I asked the jackrabbit. “How come you’re sitting there and you’re not even afraid of us?”

                There was no answer.

                The jackrabbit blinked.

                “Just as I thought,” said Wayne.

                “What?” I said.

                “You didn’t hear what he said?  He talks real quiet-like,” said Wayne.  “He said, ‘IT’S F*%KING HOT, DUMBASS.”

                We all chuckled.

                It was f*%king hot.

                                                                                                -30-