The summer had turned very, very warm in Nashville. It began with a simple dry spell in late spring. The humidity dropped to low levels, below fifteen percent, for several days in a row. Then the temperatures began to warm. They cracked the mid-nineties, and then a few days later cracked the one hundred mark, and then over the next two weeks climbed another ten degrees, so that three days running were one hundred ten degrees or higher. Then they began to drop, but very slowly, such that the entire span lasted just over three weeks. The humidity stayed at or below twenty percent during most of that span, and there was no rainfall. Others remembered shorter stretches similar to that in the past, with lower temperatures, but nothing to match this spell.
People were warned not to water their lawns, or even their shrubbery and trees. Anyone who had done expensive planting of trees and shrubs feared all their work was wasted, and that the plants would die. How could anything last through this spell with no water, unprotected by shade?
Kids quit playing in the street after early morning, and people made an extra effort to park their cars in the shade. Anyone who forgot to park in the shade generally began rolling down all four windows in the vehicle and turning the air on high to let the sealed-up hot air escape, and to let the cooler but still very hot air in to begin the air conditioning cycle. Cars that had dark leather interiors were particularly uncomfortable to get into after a long day of sitting in the sun. And anyone who accidentally touched the metal exterior of the car got a quick and severe warning not to do it again.
Used to much milder temperatures, people simply stayed indoors at all times, unless it was absolutely necessary to get out, after mid-morning. Yard work stopped completely, except perhaps at the crack of dawn for an hour or so, and people had the sense of missing what was going on in the city to some degree, because they simply didn’t get out nearly as much.
Road rage increased somewhat, although there was debate as to just how much. There seemed to be less traffic, but people getting off work who were trying to cool down their severely overheated car cabins tended to be in extremely irritated moods, far beyond normal summer levels. In a way, it probably did increase the pressure on people, increased their crankiness level, but at the same time no one really wanted to get out of their cars and fight, so it was restricted to violent gestures from behind the safety of the wheel and some choice words spoken through hard windows. In a way, it was a self-correcting phenomenon, because people simply wanted to vent their anger, but keep moving toward their destination.
People began to wonder whether they were missing anything, not getting about in the city as much as they were used to. Construction projects somehow limped onward, although hours were often adjusted to account for the severe heat. But no one who ran a construction project could afford to miss such a long period without any rain, even if it meant working the workers in highly extreme conditions. Nashville, the city of usually moderate but constantly changing temperatures and weather conditions, had reached one of those extreme points on the heat side, as it sometimes reached them on the cold side during the winter, and the only thing to do was let it pass and then talk about it afterward.
Heading southwest out of the city, near the 70/100 split, and the beginning of Highway 100 heading through the center of the state over to Memphis, someone had placed a billboard that said:
You will regret your actions, Nashville
It appeared one day, and immediately conversation about it began all over the city. It was put up during the intense heat wave, overnight, and of course some people noticed it immediately. Most people, however, seemed to become aware of it after the heat wave had subsided, and things had gotten somewhat back to normal. The only newspaper in town ran a major article about it, trying to get to the bottom of the source of the billboard, but without success. The advertising agency could not, or would not, identify the advertiser, although off the record, a representative told the newspaper that its client was from a major city in the central part of the country.
The mayor was asked about it right away, but he had really nothing to add to the story. He said that he didn’t know who had put the billboard up, and that he had immediately wondered himself who was behind it. Asked to speculate on what it meant, the mayor said he didn’t know, and reserved judgment for the time when he had more facts about it. It seemed like a reasonable answer.
Congressman Joe Caldwell, anxious to avoid a new potential issue in his re-election campaign before he and his aides had had an adequate amount of time to assess it, stayed in Washington during the aftermath of the discovery of the billboard. It was well known that he had been in town at least part of the time during the heat wave, even commenting, “One thing you can never predict is the weather,” but had departed suddenly on an early flight the day after the billboard first was noticed, and chatter began.
One of the local radio stations ran a contest to see how many different answers its listeners could come up with as to why Nashville should regret anything. Then a list was chosen by the management of the station, together with the DJs, thinning down the number of answers into a “best” list, then submitting it to its listeners for a vote. The single largest block was from Nashville’s African-American community, generally commenting on the flagrant discrimination of the past. Even though the worst of that climate had long since departed, it was felt by those listeners that not enough had been done to adequately make up for the legacy of discrimination. Other listeners commented on the state of education in Nashville, or the closed political situation, or a general sameness among the attitudes of major parts of the population. For the most part, however, those listeners who had an opinion about what Nashville should regret, candidly admitted they had no idea if the billboard referred to that, or if the person responsible for the billboard was even aware of the issues they presented to the station.
The heat wave subsided, and the billboard continued to stand, although commentary about it dropped off considerably as temperatures cooled and attitudes got back to normal. Those traveling around Highway 70 and Highway 100 were reminded of it whenever they saw it, but nothing matched the initial impact. Still, a minor cloud hung over the city, in the sense that at certain intervals when people who saw it would stop and reflect on how long it had been there, it came back to them, and when that had happened often enough, it had a somewhat irritating but ominous effect, much like a drill or a chainsaw being used by a neighbor on a spring afternoon when the windows to the house are open.