Good gosh. How could a parent do that with a toddler, walking them in bare feet????
Of course, when I was in the USN went as part of a detachment to Yuma (for ACR training) at the end of July back in 1978 or 1979, and my buddy who joined up and was stationed at Mirimar with VF-126 rode his 175cc Yamaha out to meet up with me. We got a motel room, and since the flag went up saying it was too hot to work, I went back to the motel room and drank and watched stupid television.
Right around noon, I decided to go to a Jack-in-the-Box across the street for something to eat.
I was barefoot and slightly plastered in the middle of the day.
I got about halfway to the yellow line on that black asphalt road before my nerve endings got a message through to my foggy brain, and could barely hopscotch wildly back to the side of the road in time to avoid blistering my feet.
Hoo boy. Never made that mistake again in my life to this day.
Funny. We flew out there from Cecil Field on a C-130, and it was a long, long flight over Texas. I never knew just how big it was.
When we landed, and they dropped the ramp, the blast of dry hot air that flowed up the ramp into the plane where it hit us was like having a giant hair dryer turned on you.
They said it was something like 115 degrees, and it wasn’t that unpleasant bringing to mind the silly “but it’s a dry heat” observation.
But I found out that when you went out into that for any length of time, especially when your head was uncovered, it really beat down on you. You could imagine someone lost in the desert looking up at a malignant sun just mercilessly beating you down.
I went out for a walk and realized the top of my head felt like it was on fire, and nobody-NOBODY else was out walking around. I walked by a swimming pool and saw these heads just sticking out of the water, no visible body, and I thought it was odd, until I went in later myself and found the entire pool was constructed in a way with the bottom angling out all around the pools so you could just about lay on your back anywhere around the periphery of the pool and only have your head sticking out.
I thought “Damn. Life in Yuma, Arizona in July!”