Altitude, Attitude and Fortitude: A Moist Memoir

Look back in perspiration

By Ed Goldman

On a recent long weekend in another state, I had the luxury of wondering why when it climbs to 98 degrees in a lakeside community, at an elevation of more than 5,000 feet, it’s not nearly as oppressive as the same temperature can be at 30 feet, the elevation of California’s capital, where I live the rest of the year.

I’m sure the answer is equal parts altitude and attitude, at least for me. When I’m vacationing, the external and internal climates seem to complement one another. (For younger readers: “complement” doesn’t mean sending each other love bombs.) And when you spoon a dollop of nostalgia into the mixture, the result can be almost too pleasant to explain. But explaining stuff is in my job description, so I’ll try.

The pull of mountain air

When I was not quite eight years old, my family moved to Southern California from the east coast after my dad retired at age 42 from the New York City fire department. To help ease our transition, my dad’s folks had us stay with them for a few months in the apartment house they owned in the lake town of Elsinore. While the elevation was nearly 1300 feet (and presumably still is), it was an arid desert environment that got very warm in the summer (and presumably still does). We arrived in June.

At that point, I had experienced dry heat only once in my young life, and only for a brief period: when the train carrying us to our new life in California stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico and we were allowed about two hours to wander around.

My parents were surprisingly more concerned about my two older brothers and me straying from a depot surrounded by cacti than they’d ever seemed about our doing the same in the urban jungle of New York. So none of us left the train station and I was barely allowed to leave the train itself. My mom saw to that. She took me by the hand as we walked past Native American vendors who’d set up temporary kiosks alongside the railroad tracks. Several sold beaded jewelry but there were also beaded moccasins, beaded handbags, beaded coin purses and beaded shirts.

But I was most surprised by a lack of beads—on my forehead. In New York, summers often felt so moist and hot that I had grown used to profusely perspiring when I felt hot. (An angry ex-New Yorker said, explaining why he’d left the city forever, “It wasn’t the heat. It was the stupidity.” But I digress.)

This heat was different. It made me hot but not short of breath. Sweat wasn’t burning my eyes as it dropped into them. According to a number of sources, most boys don’t even sweat until they turn nine or so. Since I’d been perspiring since the age of five, I suppose you could consider me an early adapter.

Elsinore was that kind of hot. Zero humidity or breezes. Just parched air. The summer itself was one of tragedy and hope. Right after we got to California my dad’s kid sister Lillian died in her early 30s in Lakewood, where we’d soon be moving to start our new chapter. My dad got a job working in a warehouse and moved us into a tiny rental house, then studied to be a claims adjuster. Within a year he had a license to do so and started doing it for a moving company, and my parents bought their first home, ever—and the final one they’d ever live in together.

Marcel Proust had his nostalgic madeleines to send his protagonist swirling back in his mind to his early life in “Remembrance of Things Past.” And I had the still, hot breath of a lake town summer to propel me into mine. We all have almost mnemonic touchstones to cause us to time-travel. They can be upsetting, illuminating and refreshing all at once. But what a way to go.

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Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).