CLAYBORN, IA — The Clayborn County Board of Supervisors, citing a National Weather Service forecast that uses the word “dome” in a way nobody around here finds reassuring, voted 3–0 Tuesday evening to designate the walk-in beer cooler at the Highway 14 Casey’s General Store as the county’s primary public cooling center, a decision reached in the eleven minutes between the meeting being called to order and Supervisor Dale Krummert needing to leave for his grandson’s T-ball game.
The vote came after Emergency Management Coordinator Renee Halsey informed the board that ambient temperatures next week are projected to reach 104 degrees, that the county’s official cooling center — the basement of the old Carnegie library — has been locked since 2019, and that the only person who knew where the key went was Lyle Pemberton, who, as readers of this paper have been reminded with some frequency, died in March.
“We considered the courthouse, but the courthouse AC is the courthouse AC,” Krummert said, referring to a Trane unit that has been audibly dying since the second Bush administration. “We considered the school gym, but the school gym is currently a graduation venue, a funeral venue, and, as of last Thursday, a wedding venue. The Casey’s beer cave is 38 degrees and has a door. We were trying to be practical.”
Other locations briefly discussed and rejected, according to minutes kept by clerk Bonnie Tessmer in her usual blue Bic, included the Clayborn Savings & Loan vestibule (“too small, and the clock is still wrong”), the meat locker at Marv’s IGA (“Marv said no, in writing”), and the inside of Pastor Vince’s 2003 Buick LeSabre, which Pastor Vince had not offered and was not present to defend.
Casey’s shift manager Tonya Brunkhorst, reached Wednesday morning at the register while ringing up a breakfast pizza, said she had not been contacted by the county, the state, or anyone identifying themselves as an emergency anything, and that the beer cave holds approximately fourteen people if nobody is wearing a backpack. “We’re a convenience store,” Brunkhorst said. “I have one bathroom and it’s for paying customers. I don’t know what they want me to do, hand out wristbands.”
Mrs. Peterson, who has lived on Elm Street since 1971 and considers any temperature above 88 degrees a personal affront, said she intended to ride out the heat dome the way she rode out the 1988 heat dome, the 2012 heat dome, and what she still calls “the bad July,” which is to say in her basement with a damp washcloth and the Cardinals on the radio. “I’m not going to a Casey’s to be cold,” she said. “I’d rather sweat with dignity.”
Halsey, asked Wednesday afternoon what residents without basements or functioning air conditioning should do during the projected six-day stretch, paused for a long moment and said the county was “continuing to develop the plan,” which she clarified meant she was going to call Tonya Brunkhorst personally and apologize.
The forecast high for Sunday is 106. The forecast high inside the Casey’s beer cave, per the thermostat Brunkhorst checked while we were on the phone, is 38, which she noted was about thirty degrees colder than anything the Board of Supervisors had ever shown up for.