On Sunday, the Persian Gulf International Airport in Iran reported a heat index of 152°F. Think about that for a minute. The hottest temperature I’ve ever been in was one summer in Arizona where I think it got up to 122 or 124, and that was brutal even being on the lake. I can’t imagine tacking on another 30 degrees. According to a Bloomberg report, July already has 10 of the hottest days in recorded history.
This is my eighth summer living on the East Coast and aside from the heat, I am still not used to the humidity. Actually, I don’t think I ever will be. I spent the first 48 years of my life living in Southern California and starting when I was about 4 until probably my freshman year in college, I spent most of my summers in Arizona, which was hot but not humid. The landscape and the people left an indelible impression on me and though I can’t see myself ever going back—at least to live—I’ll always be more drawn to and more at home in the desolate beauty of Arizona and the American West.
The first trips I can remember were camping along the Arizona side of the Colorado River at a campground called Buckskin Mountain State Park—though to us it was always just “Buckskin.” I used to sleep across the bench seat of my Dad’s ’74 Ford F-100 pickup (which I still have) and he and my stepmother Linda slept in the bed. Summers along the river are some of the best memories of childhood I have and I guard them religiously. There was a happiness there, especially with my dad, that really started to erode as I got older, but those early years were magical.
After a couple summers at Buckskin, Dad and Linda bought a little Aljo trailer in a park called Windmill on the California side of the river about halfway between the Parker Dam and Parker, Arizona. The trailer wasn’t very big but it had a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen—and to me it was huge, especially compared to sleeping in the truck. For the next several years, until they bought the house at Lake Havasu, that trailer park was my summer home and I loved it.
One night when I was maybe 8 or 9, the trailer started shaking in the middle of the night. Growing up in Southern California, I naturally thought it was an earthquake, until I heard the unmistakable EEEE AWWW EEEE AWWW of the donkey who was just outside the window apparently rubbing his backside against the trailer the way a bear rubs against a tree. Come to find out, there were herds of wild donkeys that would come down out of the hills across the highway from the trailer park to drink from the river. Often, you could hear them make their way through the park and I guess they occasionally got an itch that only a trailer could scratch.
Our trailer was on the back row of the park and just behind it was a line of tamarisk trees that separated the park from the highway and the hills on the other side where the donkeys lived. In the summer months, the trees were home to the cicadas, whose buzzing broke the silence of the desert. To this day, when the cicadas come out on our street, I’m instantly taken back to memories of summers on the river.
Until I was in junior high, my mom and I moved every year, which meant that I was always the new kid at school. I had a lot of acquaintances at school, but few real friends. So throughout elementary school, I counted the days until summer when I could get back to the desert and back to my friends along the river because those friends were consistent. The funny thing was that even though many of them lived within 20 minutes or so back home, I only ever saw them in the summer. Scott was the exception. His parents owned the trailer park, so he was there year round. Whenever we would go down, our friend Tim and I would help him get all of his chores done so we could all go do stuff together—and there were always chores to do, like restocking the drink coolers or moving bags of ice from the back room to the ice box out front. But once the chores were done, we were free. Sometimes, we’d grab some inner tubes and catch a ride up river to Parker Dam and spend the next couple hours floating on the current back down to the park. At one point, someone gave Scott a little boat, maybe 8 feet long. It was a total shitheap, but the beat-up Evinrude outboard motor on the back worked well enough (most of the time) to take us up river to a place called Sundance where we’d spend hours in the arcade playing Asteroids Deluxe and drinking Cherry Cokes.
I think it was 7th or 8th grade when we sold the trailer on the river and got a house in Lake Havasu. It wasn’t on the lake, but you could see it from the backyard. Havasu was a whole different world compared to the river. It was enormous by comparison and since there was an actual town it had more options for entertainment and play, which meant that more of my dad’s friends and their families came down. My dad loved “toys”—especially things you could ride or drive—and over the course of my childhood, he amassed quite a collection. When we were at the lake, Dad loved to see people having fun, and if he could buy some sort of vehicle or object to enable or further that fun, he rarely hesitated. I won’t run down the whole list of things we had, but I will share a quick story that might give you an idea of what an impulsive toy buyer my dad was. In the late 1960s, the London Bridge was dismantled, sold, and reassembled in Lake Havasu as a tourist attraction. In the English village that was built around one end of the bridge there was a movie theater and in the summer of 1977 my dad took us to see The Spy Who Loved Me. There’s a scene in the film where Bond is making his way from a submarine to the villain’s underwater lair and to get there he rides a Wetbike, which is basically a water jet-powered motorcycle that uses skis instead of wheels. My dad had been riding motorcycles since he was a kid and this looked like it was more fun that any of the motorcycles he had, so he decided then and there that he had to have one. At the time, everyone thought it was just another Bond gadget, but my dad did some digging and found out what it was and where to get one. It wasn’t long before he bought not one but two because he thought it would be more fun to be able to ride with a friend.
When I tell Adrianne some of these stories she just shakes her head and smiles and reminds me what incredibly unique experiences they were. As I’ve gotten older I realize how unusual and amazing and joyful those summers were, but I’ve only really seen it in hindsight. Adrianne says it’s an example of something called Reference Group Theory, which basically suggests that an individual's identification with a specific reference group shapes their attitudes and values and informs what they see as normal. As she was explaining it to me, it made total sense. At the time, I was in it and so were my family and friends, so none of it—the boats, the toys, the Havasu house—seemed unusual to me at all. But beyond all of the stuff, there was a real sense of community, and the way everyone pitched in and supported one another reinforced it. I don’t know whether it was unique to the time or that specific group of people, but everyone contributed to the group where and how they could, whether that meant pitching in for gas, buying food, or restocking the beer coolers. In return, though my dad technically owned the boat and a lot of the gear, it was always available for others to use—and that even included the house. For years, there was an unofficial calendar and everyone knew that if nobody else was using it, the keys were always under one of the rocks in the planter on the front porch. All Dad and Linda asked in return was that you leave it the way you found it and restock whatever you used. There was an assumption and expectation and because people lived up to that expectation, it worked—and because I know that it can work, it bums me out that it now seems so rare.
Given what my childhood was like, it’s not surprising that summer always get me thinking about those years on the river and on the lake. I haven’t seen any of my old friends in decades, but I love revisiting these memories and I appreciate having a place to share them.
Thanks so much for reading.
What a beautiful memoir. I grew up on the shores of the Hudson River in New York. It resonates somewhat with your experience in that my parents followed the free range chicken school of child raising. After breakfast my friends and I would gather and pretty much do what we wanted until it was time for lunch or dinner. It was a beautiful time until my friends moved away and I was alone.
Loved this Jeffery! The way you wrote it took me back to my own childhood summer memories.
For what it is worth, I have lived in Ohio all of my life except for 1 year in Florida and I can say you never get used to the humidity.