The point is that Louisiana’s heat is inescapable and aggressive. It dominates life to such an extent that you start to think consciously about things that are, in friendlier climates, unremarkable: breathing, for instance, and blood circulation. You start to strategize about walking, replacing it whenever possible with sprints from one air-conditioned building to the next. Life—restricted to the biosphere of your house and the local supermarket—begins to seem like an endurance experiment engineered by NASA.
This means that, from June to September, Louisiana’s outdoors are off-limits. Activities that would have been pleasant diversions to the tropical fall or the temperate winter—hiking, biking, tracking weird birds with binoculars—become exercises in instant dehydration. Fortunately, however, the state comes with its own cooling system: It is one of the wettest in the nation, soaked by patchy marshes and Rorschach lakes, which are in turn drained and filled by an extensive network of mostly hospitable rivers. In all, Louisiana is more than twenty percent water, and through several millennia of absurdly hot summers residents have found ways to squeeze into the state’s aquatic fifth by boating, skiing, swimming, fishing, and sportively dodging things with sharp teeth. In my experience, the most effective antidote to the heat is what I like to consider the unofficial summer sport of the South: tubing. Other parts of the country tube too, of course, but they may as well be knitting. In Oregon or Nebraska, tubing is just an incidentally wet version of a stroll in the woods, the spiritual equivalent of a hundred other outdoor leisure activities. In the South, it represents one of the only possible escapes from a greenhouse climate threatening to replace human life with ferns. Southerners are forced to tube.
by Sam Anderson, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: Debbie Fleming Caffery, courtesy of the Octavia Gallery
