SUDDENLY Washington was melting in a heatwave and this only a few days after frost warnings for plants. What had happened to spring, people wanted to know.
New York likes to put its own gloss even on a heatwave and the New York Times reported that "people could be excused for being mystified, discombobulated, distraught, furious, dazed, crazed, tentative, dizzy and, of course, just plain really, really hot".
Well, There in Washington people did not have the energy to say all that. It was the hottest for this time of May since 1911 as the thermometer soared to 96 Fahrenheit on Monday. It reached 100 at a nearby naval base.
The electricity power stations were caught on the hop as the air conditioning demands surged at a time when demand is usually low and plants are serviced. There were "brown outs" at the generators causing some hospitals and schools to be evacuated.
Even the city morgue had to turn away some of the dead coming from hospitals. The Code Orange "unhealthful air" warning of rising ozone levels was given out but there was nothing you could do about it unless you stopped breathing.
The heat stroke victims started to arrive in the hospitals. Doctors said the warning signs are "confusion, disorientation and cold clammy hands with little sweating". The newly arrived Irish Times correspondent had most of these symptoms but accompanied by lots of sweating so reckoned he did not have heat stroke.
Mind you, air conditioning helps. You stay indoors to survive. It's tough on those who are too poor to have it at home or whose plants broke down. The city opened 20 "cooling centres" mainly for elderly people.
The weather pundits were in their element. Americans are obsessed with what the weather is doing and while one television channel does nothing else but give weather reports, all of them give updates so often that you become an expert on the gyrations of isobars over the West Coast, the Rockies, the Great Plains, the North East, the South and the mid Atlantic states.
Within days you can talk knowledgeably about the "jet stream" either sweeping in the cold air from Canada or letting in the hot, moist blast from the "Bermuda ridge" of hot pressure in the Caribbean.
In the Great Plains the weather is more than a conversational ploy as farmers fear the worst drought since the 1930s when the Dust, Bowl added to the economic Depression woes. The "panhandle" areas of Oklahoma and north west Texas are the hardest hit this time.
The choking dust storms of the kind presidential candidate, Bob Dole, remembers from his Kansas youth, are said to be less likely in this election year. Remedial measures taken under the Roosevelt New Deal such as drought resistant grasses and tree barriers are still said to be effective.
Nevertheless, up to 10,000 farms in Oklahoma are estimated to be facing bankruptcy. In Texas, 130 counties have applied for emergency federal subsidies for ranchers to buy feed as 40 per cent of pasture land is too arid for grazing cattle which make up a $6 billion industry.
If Americans find all this too grim, they are packing cinemas to watch a record breaking film about tornadoes called Twister. The special effects computer designed tornadoes are spectacular and so are the box office takings of $100 million in the first 12 days, just a little under the Jurassic Park record.
In one town in the Mid West, a real tornado was raging nearby while a cinema showing the Hollywood version had to be evacuated. That was really getting value for money.
Bob Dole on the stump in Wisconsin knows a good political metaphor when he sees one. His audience loved it when he told them: "Too often President Clinton's statements are like the tornadoes in the movie, Twister - it looks like a lot is happening but in reality it's all just special effects."
Newspapers also know a good weather story. Reporters and photographers were sent to prowl around the public parks and the sidewalks to capture the voice of the people as they sweltered.
An elderly lady in Manhattan admitted she had not researched the subject but added: "I don't know if the volcanoes have something to do with it or what. But I think it's the space capsules we send up. They're changing the wind direction."
Funny she should say that. As the heatwave struck, NASA was sending the space shuttle Endeavour into orbit. The six astronauts then released a nitrogen filled antenna the size of a tennis court, the largest inflatable structure in space since the 1960s.
It burned up in space just like we were burning up on land. Let's give the last word to a Washington bartender, Emmanuel Cazeau, who likes blizzards. "This heat - I can't stand it and I'm from Haiti. But there we don't have this humidity. The heat is tropical and you also have the water. But this heat - I can't stand it."
OK. Time for a cold beer.