Hot Car, no AC

In August of 1990 I drove from my home in Peterborough, Ontario, 3,400 km southwest to El Paso, Texas, to take up a post as a nanny for a few months.

We were driving in a convoy: Leslie, mother of my 2 year old charge, an aspiring midwife (El Paso being a hotbed of midwifery education) was driving her mother-in-law’s VW Vanagon, and I was driving my 1980 Toyota Tercel. Leslie’s van had air conditioning. My Tercel did not.

This was in a day before most cars had air conditioning, so this wasn’t unusual. I’d certainly never owned a car with AC, and maybe only the 1975 Dodge of my father’s, the one with velour seats that got totalled in a not-my-fault accident when I was 16 and driving home from my job at Canadian Tire, maybe only that car was the one with AC in my life to date at that point. And, of course, the Vanagon, which I was occasionally allowed to swap into, switching places for a respite from the heat.

The heat came to a head as we stopped in Nashville for a muffler job on the VW. I remember clearly the temperature on the sign outside the muffler shop showing 100ºF (38ºC), and that was without factoring in the humidity (the Almanac validates my memory).

Driving when it’s that hot, you drive with all the windows open and with the fan on full blast, hopeful that somehow blowing blistering hot air over your body will make it feel less blistering hot (it doesn’t).

By the time we got to El Paso a few days later, it was a comparatively balmy 87ºF (30ºC). Cold enough, in fact, the outdoor swimming pools were closed up for the end of the summer, because it wasn’t deemed hot enough to swim.

I love most things about my 2016 Kia Soul EV, but its air conditioning system isn’t one of them. I put $400 into it a couple of years ago; when the AC stopped working again at the start of this summer I got an estimate of $1,300 to repair it, and decided that I had better things to spent that money on, so opted to leave it broken.

It’s been a hot, hot summer, with more heat warning days than not, it sometimes seems. And so this summer, bopping around the Island in my Soul, has felt a lot like that trip 34 years ago down the heart of America: windows open, radio blaring, blistering hot air masquerading as something it cannot and never will be.