I’ve often heard it said that the South didn’t really come into its own as an industrial power until air conditioning and rural electricity made its way into about every building south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The winter’s temperatures were quite tolerable in the South but the summer’s heat was intolerable for many folks.

Whether it’s “global warming” or just a normal “climate change” still is an open question. Scientists on both sides of the issue have their opinions and can back them up with facts. It often looks like the scientists who “shake the money tree” the hardest get more grant money than the others and capture more headlines from the press.

In the meanwhile we average folks welcome our air conditioners and try to limit most of our outdoor activities to the early mornings or late afternoons. Even this year’s abundant crop of mosquitoes seems to prefer the relatively cooler evening hours.

We here in the South didn’t always have air conditioning to cool us during the summer’s heat and doing without thee conveniences brings back some fond memories.

Getting all dressed-up in our best clothes and heading to the family church on a Sunday morning was a routine that started out early enough in the day that Sunday School was usually tolerably cool. It was only after the school’s lessons that we took a short break than proceeded to the church where a larger (and older) crowd gathered to hear the full blown church service. If this service lasted longer than the usual hour the heat could start to get oppressive. I’ve seen folks pass out on the floor from heat exhaustion during these summer church services.

Unless you were fortunate enough to belong to one of the more affluent big city churches, it was rare to have air conditioning or even electric fans in the church. The face-cooling breezes were usually brought about with one of those cardboard fans on a wooden stick. These hand-held billboards were supplied to most rural churches by firms such as the local funeral home which was figuring on getting some local business sooner or later by the folks who were fanning their faces. With each pass of the fan in front of your face the advertising message got through like a pop-up ad on a computer or one of those over-used TV commercials.

Once we were liberated from these mandatory summer services we kids would rush home, get out of our good clothes and into the barest minimum amount of clothes we could get by with, beg off the afternoon-long Sunday lunch and head for the waterways or woods. We could stand the heat better in the shade of a big pecan tree or live oak and if things started to get too hot there we could jump into a nearby creek for a better cool down.

Even though our elders discouraged fishing or shooting on a Sunday, we always seemed to include a fishing pole or a .22 rifle in our afternoon’s activities. We were taught that Sundays were a day of rest and to us youngsters, rest was catching a few fish or busting tin cans with the .22.

I remember that I once asked the local preacher at the Sunday School why we should find God any better in church than we could while we were on the creek fishing each Sunday. The Rev. James Parker Dees (later the founding Bishop of the Orthodox Anglican Church) replied that there was no reason that God shouldn’t be just as much present on the creek as he was in church but would we be giving our full attention to God or to the fish if we were outdoors? The Rev. Dees was an ardent fisherman himself and I later spent several Sunday afternoons with him casting lures to bass.

Years later my father’s work with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture took him to the mountains of our state during the late summer. We rented a small cottage near Hendersonville and I became introduced to the cooler weather of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I began to understand why folks from areas that suffered from the oppressive humidity and heat liked to spend a few weeks each summer cooling-down in a mountain stream. This was a particularly effective way to combat the heat if you could have a fly rod in your hands and a trout rising to the hatch on the Davidson or Green Rivers. It also seemed like the rule of being required to show up at every Sunday’s church service was a bit more relaxed in the mountains.

It was on the Green River that I had a real “awakening” late one Sunday morning as I wandered away from the river in an attempt to avoid some dangerous rapids (the Narrows). As I was pushing through some rhododendron thickets I suddenly came on a small clearing where an elderly man was cooking something in a large copper kettle. I think both of us were startled because it scared the pants off me when I saw this mountaineer reach for a convenient shotgun leaned against bag of sugar. I’d stumbled into one of the local industries during work hours on a Sunday morning.

President Clinton may have thought that he invented the “Don’t see, Don’t tell” phrase but this is pretty much what I stammered to the man as I backed out of the opening and went back out of the bushes the same way I went in. Maybe I should have been in church that Sunday because somebody upstairs was looking after me (and the moon shiner) that day.

Even though I grew up in Eastern North Carolina I still have a love for our mountains. I suppose the ideal situation to be in is to spend a large part of the heat of the summer in the cooler climate of the hills and return to the coast during the ideal times for fishing and hunting. Folks from the coast may sneer at the relatively small brook, rainbow or brown trout of the Blue Ridge hills but there’s something about wading in one of those cold streams and the challenge of enticing one of those fish into striking a tiny, hand made, lure. It’s certainly a cooling outdoor experience.