We asked Paul Dorpat, Wallingford’s unofficial Official Historian and author of a History of Seattle Snows, to comment on this week’s heat wave:
Thanks for the opportunity to reflect on today’s record setting heat. Well, I’ll say! It certainly was hot! How hot? Regressively hot. It sent several hot flashes of a child’s summer in Spokane, where I grew up. Although even there 103 was hardly commonplace. Unable to take my bike up to the Comstock Park Swimming Pool on 29th (in Spokane), I kept on writing in my basement on Eastern.
Except for one Spokane inspiration – a nostalgic act that my mom must have inspired. Rather than dry the essential daily duds I washed this morning (in cold water) in the gas clothes dryer here in the basement, where it is blessedly merely warm, I did as mom would have done. I rigged a clothes line across our deck using an extension cord and the bag of clothespins (left over from my now abandoned years of hanging prints to dry from wires rigged across the ceiling of the basement). It took minutes for my lighter wash to dry so stiff you could stand my t-shirts on their seams. It required only a few seconds more for the more substantial “athletic clothes” to dry – the duds I will wear into eternity. (When they put me away let them fold my hands over a cotton t-shirt held loose over sweatpants. If it is a swelter like this, then best nail the lid.)
It may have been hot as hell today. We cannot know for sure, though, for, as Wallingfordians, we are all headed for heaven, which, on the game board of eternity, is reached through Ballard (but without stopping in Fremont).
Fortunately, the heat wave is scheduled to ease up shortly, lest the cotton t-shirt and sweatpants be called for early.