Hell has no fury like scorching Hilton Head. But we also know the solution | Opinion

They tell a joke this time of year about the South Carolina Lowcountry, and preachers, and the hinges of hell.

They say it’s hard to be a preacher here because in the winter it’s so nice nobody wants to go to heaven and in the summer it’s so hot nobody is afraid of hell.

We’re in the nobody’s afraid of hell season — in case you’ve been afraid to leave the house since May.

Maybe you saw the headline last week : “Hilton Head temps are scorching. How to prevent a beach trip from turning into an ER visit.”

Our “feels-like” temperatures of late have hovered around 105 degrees, with daily highs over 90 — usually a bit above average for the date. It’s always hot in July, but a headline in Scientific American last month warns: “This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ Summer Heat.” It says: “The face of summer is transforming, as people today face more frequent, longer-lasting and hotter heat waves than they did several decades ago.”

As a grandparent from the South, I do indeed know summer heat. And I even know — gasp! — that humankind has not always had air conditioning. Here in the Lowcountry, that’s why people had porches, straw hats, funeral-home fans and seersucker suits. It’s why we love watermelon, swimming holes with tire swings and weekends at campsites “down the rivah” where at least there’s a breeze.

It’s why a church deacon was assigned to exercise his God-given talent of raising and lowering windows. It’s why the courts would take the summer off, and rich men mopped their brows with handkerchiefs while poor folks used rags, and women called sweat a “glow.”

It’s why country kids squirted each other with a garden hose, and firefighters unleashed whole hydrants on city kids in the streets.

We survived on dock-diving, car vents, window fans and sweet tea.

We had sort of an unwritten IQ test. You could tell who passed it because they headed for Flat Rock, N.C. in the summer. Or at least Oyster Street or Mullet Street, down by the May River in Bluffton.

But for several sweltering summers now, word has penetrated our air-conditioned havens that it seems hotter because it is hotter. And it’s going to get worse. Last September, NASA pronounced the summer of 2023 as the hottest on record .

It’s reported that heat causes more deaths than other forces of nature we’re warned so much more about, including hurricanes. And NOAA has come up with a new way to warn the public of these dangers by issuing three-month heat forecasts .

For immediate warnings, the National Weather Service is experimenting with something it calls NWS HeatRisk . It is “a color-numeric-based index that provides a forecast risk of heat-related impacts to occur over a 24-hour period.” Charleston and Columbia are among cities now guided by “heat maps” to better plan for the consequences of hotter times.

One thing the cities have concluded is that they need more trees. We’ve known that on Hilton Head for some time.

Years ago, when the “feels-like” temperature reached 120 degrees on Hilton Head, I asked an old-timer how they survived before air conditioning — or electricity. Perry White, born on Hilton Head in 1933, said his farming family started work in the fields early in the morning, then stretched out under trees for a nap in the heat of the day.

White has passed away since that staggering summer of 2006. But he knew then what today’s experts are saying: More trees, less pavement. “Trees were the first form of air conditioning,” White told me.

Seared into his mind at a young age was the best air conditioner located in his neck of the island. It was a sprawling tree in the yard of the Wiley family — parents of Gene Wiley and Phoebe Driessen. White told me the whole yard was covered by an oak umbrella.

That kind of umbrella is needed more desperately as we barge toward a time when we’ll remember the hellish summer of 2024 as the cool old days.