Hot Days, Cool Options : In Search of Windchill

Each day of June and July, I thought: It’s been oddly cool this summer. But I didn’t dare say it aloud, lest the Weather Gods overhear.

I guess they read my mind.

Granted, things aren’t as bad now as the summer I lived in Sherman Oaks in that little house with a swamp cooler. Talk about miserable. Outside it was 108 degrees, inside it was 97 with 100% humidity.

I gave up, wimped out, moved out of the Valley.

Now a dweller of Valley-adjacent Los Feliz, I relish that moment during my evening commute when the temperature dips five degrees just as I pass the Autry museum on the southbound 5. Ah, home, where it’s only 98 instead of 103.

But alas, I still have no AC. And I still live nowhere near the ocean.

So at night, when the ceiling fans are whirling futilely and the walls of my apartment are functioning as some sort of natural oven, I do what everyone with no pool does. I fill the bathtub with cold water, dump in as much ice as I can find and wade. With a plastic chair and a good magazine, hours can be passed this way.

Since none of my poor-starving-filmmaker friends have pools either, when I need a good dunking, I head out to Calabasas. The regulars at the Calabasas Tennis and Swim Center would like to keep it a secret--and for good reason. It looks like a country club--and was, once, a private club. But the city bought it in 1994, and now anyone can take a dip during the afternoon for $2. It’s a little slice of proletarian paradise.

On the weekends, with no air-conditioned office to escape to, I sometimes do the predictable: hit the mall. Who’s really going to say anything if I kick back in the furniture displays of Ikea in Burbank. But for pure, cool walking pleasure, I head to the Glendale Galleria, a.k.a. 1.5-million sprawling square feet of air conditioning. And after calling all nine Valley malls, I confirmed my suspicion that Glendale is, in fact, the coolest mall. Literally. The climate control is set between 68 and 72 degrees.

On other weekends, I do the unthinkable. I pull on boots. And jeans. And a leather jacket. And hop on my motorcycle for a run out Mulholland Highway.

It sounds insane--and perhaps it is. But think windchill factor here. A guy at Weather Data Inc. wanted to tell me that windchill was negligible above 35 degrees--but he’d never been on a motorcycle. Trust me: When you’re moving more than 50 mph, it suddenly feels a lot cooler.