Skin - Melody Cryns

When I walked outside the air-conditioned hospital in Porterville at 5:00 pm, the heat hit me like a ton of bricks. My skin immediately felt clammy and warm and when I got to my car, I couldn’t even touch my steering wheel for a few minutes. It’s gotta be a hundred degrees, I thought.

I turned the air conditioner on full blast in the car but even that took a few moments to cool down the boiling hot car – what the heck was I doing here in this weird dusty town in the middle of nowhere, working at a hospital making a fraction of what I made when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area – at probably not only the only word processor job in the town of Porterville, but the only word processor job in Tulare County I was sure.

People told me that $12 an hour was good, real good for Porterville – way better than the $8.50 an hour that one law firm wanted to pay me. Unbelievable.

And it was hot, 100 degrees even at 5:00 pm. What was up with that? All I could think of as I drove to Westfield School to pick Megan up from the Yes After School program at Westfield School was how could I cool off?

I pulled up in the parking lot next to the store and got out of the car again feeling the wall of heat and the clammy skin. I walked into the gym that felt nice and cool. Megan practically knocked me over. She was so happy here in Porterville, happier than I’d ever seen her. It was the one thing that kept me going, seeing how happy she was, waving at all of her friends.

“You wanna go swimming?” I asked.

“Yeah!” Megan and I walked to the car and I told her to be careful of the seat belt because it might be hot. Gary was taking a nap and he never wanted to go anywhere anyway, so we put our bathing suits on and I headed out to the swimming hole up in Springville for the Tule River – there was a perfect spot to swim in cool, clear water – at a place that always made me think of that Credance Clearwater Revival song, “Green River.” Come to find out, the John and Tom Fogarty of CCR actually had association with family in Porterville and even have a song on one of their albums called “Porterville.” It doesn’t paint the most positive picture of Porterville, though.

I often wondered if they used the Tule River to write their songs such as Green River and even Born on the Bayou. I mean, when were those guys ever at the Bayou? This was probably as close as I’d ever get, I thought as we parked the car up in Springville, about 10 miles up into the foothills from Porterville, and we walked down the hill holding our towels, feeling that wall of heat, until we could get ourselves into the clear, cool water of the Tule River.