Bonita Springs Florida Weekly

The BIG WET

Need a reminder that you're in Florida? It's the humidity.



“Movies about Florida often emphasize the humidity. People wipe their brows a lot, and fan themselves dramatically beneath the palm trees.” — Jeff McCullers, retired educator

“Movies about Florida often emphasize the humidity. People wipe their brows a lot, and fan themselves dramatically beneath the palm trees.” — Jeff McCullers, retired educator

THERE ARE ONLY TWO WAYS TO talk about humidity in subtropical Florida, and one tells you very little about living with it: the science of the thing. “Humidity is a measure of the amount of water vapor in the air,” explain online experts at airthings.com. “Relative humidity measures (that amount, and compares it) to the maximum amount of water vapor (moisture). The higher the temperature, the more water vapor the air can hold. For example, a densely saturated amount of air may contain 0.9 ounces of water per cubic metre at 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but only 0.2 ounces of water per cubic meter of air at 46F.”

That’s a start, the way a blueprint for the National Cathedral might be a start to seeing the magnificent building itself.

“Relative humidity is how much moisture or saturation there is in the atmosphere, as a percentage,” says Stephen Shiveley, a meteorologist at The National Weather Service in the Tampa Bay area.

“We compare temperature with dew point temperature. A dew point is the temperature at which water starts to fall. So the temperature outside right now is 90.2 degrees Fahrenheit. To get saturation, you’d have to cool the temperature down to 79 Fahrenheit, the dew point. If I kept the dew point constant and brought the air temperature down, when we hit 79 Fahrenheit, condensation would start.” That might mean morning fog, clouds, drizzle.

“If you have to work outside, try to avoid the hottest parts of the day and stay hydrated — that’s the biggest thing.” — Stephen Shiveley, meteorologist at the National Weather Service

“If you have to work outside, try to avoid the hottest parts of the day and stay hydrated — that’s the biggest thing.” — Stephen Shiveley, meteorologist at the National Weather Service

If a column of air is even about two-thirds saturated, Mr. Shiveley adds, “it’s already so moist your sweat can’t evaporate. The atmosphere has too much moisture so it doesn’t need your sweat.”

It doesn’t need your sweat. And you may not need it, either, but in Florida summers you’ll sweat it anyway, whether you want to or not.

That brings us to the other way to talk about humidity and the role it plays in our lives: with story, metaphor, personal experience and history — what it was like before air conditioning, for example. Or how marathoners survive it. Or how moviemakers usually typecast Florida with a dripping stand-in actor who never appears in the credits or gets paid: Humidity.

FOLEY

FOLEY

This week, we remind readers what they may already intimately know when weather reports describe a relative humidity in the 80% or higher range: “The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all … breathing water in air; you learn to live with it and you learn to like it, or you leave.”

‘The way we were’

Those words come from Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts, who lived in the very humid Bombay, India, (now known as Mumbai) for a decade after escaping from an Australian prison in 1980 following his incarceration for bank robbery and fleeing there.

But he might as well have been talking about Florida, a subtropical climate with tropical conditions in summer, and tropical conditions all the time in the movies, even when it’s not summer, or not Florida.

GERMAN

GERMAN

On occasion during the filming of “Body Heat” in Lake Worth — the 1981 movie with William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Ted Danson — “ironically it was very bitter cold outside, in the 30s,” recalls Mark Foley, who worked as an extra. And nobody was sweating, which generally takes both heat and humidity. “We were constantly spraying the actors with a spray bottle to suggest a sultry summer heat — both the humidity and body heat radiating in a sexual aspect.”

A former U.S. Congressman who served from 1995 to 2006, Mr. Foley was a 27-year-old restaurateur at the time. He owned The Lettuce Patch restaurant in Lake Worth, now known as Lake Worth Beach.

“They tried to rent the place from me for a week to film (the restaurant scenes) but I didn’t want to close and leave my customers in the lurch,” so they used another place up the street, he recalls. Along with a lot of spray bottles, apparently.

Humidity is worth money in a steaming hot picture.

MCCULLERS

MCCULLERS

“Movies about Florida often emphasize the humidity. People wipe their brows a lot, and fan themselves dramatically beneath the palm trees,” notes retired educator Jeff McCullers, a music, books and movie aficionado born and raised in a home without air conditioning in an Estero orange grove.

“In ‘Key Largo,’ (a 1948 film noir crime drama), bad guy Edward G. Robinson is sweaty and moist, while our heroes Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall look immaculate and freshly pressed even during the hurricane scene.”

And in “Body Heat,” he points out, “William Hurt and Kathleen Turner were slick with sweat in most of their scenes, even where they weren’t wearing any clothes at all. Apparently, that Florida sheen can look cinematic or even sexy so long as the audience is watching in an air-conditioned cinema.”

Floridians themselves become accustomed to it, he reports, which isn’t the same thing as loving it or thinking of it as sexy.

“I grew up in an old frame house in an orange grove. It had huge sash windows in which every one of the cords that held the counterweights had rotted in the damp, and so every window had to be propped open with a stick. During the summer, there was plenty of cross-ventilation.

“Even still in the 1960s, the Florida heat and humidity were managed without air conditioning. Most homes kept as much of a shade tree canopy around them as possible, and every room had large windows that were always wide open. Windows were basically open all day and all night except when it was raining. Those windows stayed open even when we left the house. Every room had a fan: a big box fan in the living room, of course, and smaller fans for the bedrooms.”

Fans don’t cool air, they just move it around.

None of this is particularly “fun,” as Mr. McCullers puts it — and he isn’t the only one.

“Essentially I don’t mind humidity — as long as I have the right product,” says Barbara Sadie German, known by her middle name to the broad audience she serves across Southwest Florida as a morning co-host of “Logan & Sadie” on WINK FM-96.9 radio.

Her hair, wavy to curly as she describes it, can have a peculiar reaction to humidity. “If I don’t use any product whatsoever, it turns into a giant Afro. But with the correct product, it still curls nicely.”

Once upon a time, they didn’t have the right product. And even after they got it, “the humidity rots our picnic tables and swing sets,” Mr. McCullers observes from long personal experience. “It clouds up our eyeglasses. The humidity bubbles our paint. It feeds so much mildew that sometimes I wonder if Floridians use more bleach per capita than anyone else.”

It’s water, water everywhere, he says.

“It drips off everything cooler than the air around it. A glass of refreshing iced tea can generate an enormous puddle of water in just a few minutes. In the old days, most furniture was real wood, and water leaves rings on wood, so every room of every home and workplace was packed full to overflowing with coasters and saucers and doilies and rags and all sorts of other ways of capturing the bothersome condensate.”

Water world

Since humidity relies on evaporation, and evaporation requires water bodies, and the traditional Everglades system is one of the greatest water bodies in the continental United States, with its warming summer morning sun giving literal rise to humid columns of air that meet the sea-cooled vaults of afternoon sky above them, we know what it means.

Rain.

“We complain about the humidity like we complain about all weather, but the truth is, the entirety of life in Florida is and will always be about water,” explains Mr. McCullers.

“We find ourselves in a fantastic water engine, our sandy peninsula nestled between the Gulf and the straits and the ocean. At every moment, an incomprehensible amount of water is boiled off and collected in those billowing clouds that reach to the top of the sky, the water rising in an ancient cycle.

“Before that incomprehensible amount of water then falls in heart-stopping electrical apocalypses Floridians euphemistically refer to as ‘afternoon showers,’ we can feel the moisture on our skin, in our hair, even in our lungs. After the rains, the latent heat in the earth turns the whole place into a steam bath, and we can even see the roiling clouds of vapor rising up from the roadway.”

He calls it “close,” like the old-timers who shaped him.

“The old folks didn’t say, ‘It’s humid today,’ even when it was. Admitting they were miserable just seemed to add to the awfulness, so instead they used euphemisms like ‘It’s close today.’”

And for people such as field workers, roofers or runners, care is required so it doesn’t get too close, shifting from mere heat and humidity to heat exhaustion or heat stroke, which can kill you.

John Cassani, the Calusa Waterkeeper (and therefore humidity keeper) who was an exceptional marathoner able to run the 26.2 mile races in the 2½-hour range when he was young, once let it get a little too close, himself.

“Humidity causes you to perspire more than you normally would as the body tries to compensate for not enough cooling on the surface of the skin,” he says.

The runner’s rule for changing behavior or not running is generally 80/80, he notes — 80% humidity or higher when the air temperature is 80F or higher.

“When I first moved here in 1978 I’d been a distance runner for 10 years, in high school and through college, and 80F was not unusual, even when it was humid — but it wasn’t humid like it is here. So it pretty much turned me off to racing for a long time. I was 25 when I got here and I didn’t race again until I was like 52.”

After that, when he ran a marathon in warm and humid conditions at the age of 59 once, he made a mistake that can be dangerous in the subtropics: Trying to go fast, he failed to slow and drink at all of the water stops. Instead, he skipped some.

“I was so dehydrated when I finished, I couldn’t hold my head up,” he recalls. “A girl came over and said, ‘Sir, are you all right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ — like, go away and let me be.”

The next thing he knew, he was sitting in a wheelchair in the hospital tent with an IV running two liters of saline solution into his arm. After that, he was good to go.

“But I was embarrassed as hell,” he acknowledges. “There’s a science to the way you drink in heat and high humidity. You can get to the point where your body won’t absorb water quickly enough,” so the aim should be two or three ounces of water every mile, not a lot at once.

That information from the front lines, so to speak, seems a matter of common sense, but too often becomes ignored.

“If you have to work outside, try to avoid the hottest parts of the day and stay hydrated — that’s the biggest thing,” says Mr. Shiveley, the meteorologist.

“If you can find shade, use it. Take breaks. Know the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, such as lack of sweating, if your muscles feel weak, if you get cramps in your muscles. Those are among the first signs.”

If you get a headache, or dizzy, or start getting nauseous — and it isn’t love or pregnancy or COVID or your imminent marriage or one of the other common afflictions — you need some help.

Either way, real Floridians either native or imported, always keep this in mind, Mr. McCullers concludes: “That heavy wetness in the air is the feeling of being in Florida. It’s the weight of all that water in the air that leads us to take more breaks, to sit in the shade beneath the oaks, to crack open a cold beer or make a pitcher of daiquiris, to make a hand fan from a palmetto frond, and to go skinny-dipping far more often than normal people think to be proper.

“Living our whole lives in this miasma makes us moist, yes. And maybe it also connects us more directly to the natural wonders around us.

“It’s close, in a good way.” ¦

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