Verbal Thermometer

I was eating peanuts out of an old car battery casing as Pah sat beside me brewing attaya. The grass-stuffed rice bag mattress was a little lumpy, but the thatch roof over my head was keeping the square mud hut cool. It was a relative cool compared to the shade-less exterior. Any relief was welcomed. When Pah handed me a small glass of the African green tea I offered it first to Dowda whose compound we were sitting in. The motivation was cultural. I wanted to show my respect to my host. Dowda appropriately refused the tea and told me to drink first saying, “You are my stranger today. I could kill a cow.”

I figured killing the cow was a sign of respect. To Fulas cattle are a savings account. The more you have, the wealthier you are. But I didn’t want to see yet another animal die in The Gambia that week. While the extreme heat of early May hadn’t killed much livestock, it did have quite a toll on a few other creatures. It was so hot, you see, that things were falling dead out of the trees.

Measuring temperatures in words makes more sense than measuring in numbers. You can throw digits around, but they never feel personal. Descriptions like, ‘It’s just reached the point where I sweat without moving,’ or ‘It’s so hot that I have blisters on my ass just from sitting,’ do a better job of getting the message across than anything ending with “Fahrenheit” or “Celsius.” So it was with awe that I experienced an unknown extreme on the verbal heat measurement scale: ‘The point at which chameleons drop dead out of trees.’

Being from New York I’ve experienced the occasional 100+ degree day. The sun screams and everything sits still. Tar melts. People burn themselves on their seat belt buckles. Tickets to air conditioned movie theatres sell out. Not much gets done and collectively people wait. Once the temperature drops life can resume the normal rhythm and for the rest of the year people will look back and remember those few days with a hur of utter ridiculousness.

“Remember that day in July,” someone will say. “The day it was so hot even swimming in the lake couldn’t cool us off?” They’ll be saying this driving past the now frozen lake on the first day the winter temperature drops below zero. “I sure could take some of that heat right now.” Well, right now I wouldn’t mind a frozen lake.

Not only is the heat a vacuum into which all motivation and intention of constructive behavior is lost, it’s also a prime condition for my epidermal discomfort. Heat is energy. A lot of energy. A lot of energy tightly packed into a small space. And when all that idle energy realizes that there isn’t much to do, it gets restless. It finds it’s creative outlet on my skin by sculpting swirling rashes, mountainous boils, and speckled patches of infected hair follicles.

My skin isn’t the only host to medical misadventures, but it certainly holds the prominent position. I shine with the marks of a myriad scarlet letters. But inside I’ve battled heat exhaustion, giardia, and a disease I used to always die from while playing ‘The Oregon Trail’ in elementary school: dysentery. All of these ailments have had their own unique perks of discomfort, none of which quite reach the level of falling dead out of a tree. But in terms of annoying discomfort nothing can quite compare to my recent crowning achievement: a boil on the ass.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain that I have no ass. No butt. No bum. No fanny or buttocks. The maximus of my gluteous is an overstatement. There’s nothing there. It’s as mountainous as Kansas. As round as a 12th century view of the world. If I had four wheels I would be a flat-bed pick-up truck.

I never gave much deep thought to the phrase ‘pain-in-the-ass’ until recently. It’s overused. The meaning has been beaten out of it like the filling of an old feather pillow. The four words have fused together into a single four syllable word that means nothing more than ‘irritating’ and ‘annoying.’ The reality, though, is that any ailment that involves your ass is exacerbated exponentially because of its location. A boil on your stomach or on your leg isn’t pleasant, but on your ass it’s an absolute nightmare. If you have no ass, well, it’s even worse. Add to all this a day when small animals drop lifeless from above your head and I began to wonder, sitting tilted awkwardly with all my weight on the side of my thigh, “How, exactly, did I get here?”

This was a strange experience. I had seen things frozen to death before. Frozen made sense to me. It seemed easier to do. Cleaner. More matter of fact. If I didn’t want to freeze to death I could put more clothes on, move around, find shelter, start a fire. (Maybe it’s not that simple, but when you’re drunk with heat it sure seems that way.) Frozen temperatures were more of a novelty in my mind. ‘The point at which my hands go numb,’ or ‘The point at which my spit freezes before it hits the ground.’ When it gets hot you can’t keep taking clothes off.

I took comfort, despite the challenge of sitting, in the knowledge that my body was built using blueprints for a cloudy, rain-soaked island in northwestern Europe. It wasn’t my fault that I felt like I was about to join the chameleons. These kinds of temperatures might be normal here, but they were certainly not normal to me. So, I was startled to hear that none of the village elders had ever seen anything like this before. They had never seen the chameleons fall dead from the trees. They had never even heard stories about it. If it was the hottest day of their lives, then it sure as hell was the hottest day of mine.

Since then it’s been better. The first rains have come early and knocked the temperatures down into the ‘never-stop-sweating’ range. This is worlds better than the death range. Once you’re been in the death range the rashes, boils and infections don’t seem so bad. They become simple protests. Warnings that if things get worse my body might go on strike… completely. I know what to look out for, though. If my skin changes from green to yellow and my eyes start moving independently from each other I’ll be sure to climb down out of the tree.