Where It’s Really Hot : Weather: In the high desert, people regard the question of how they cope with high temperatures as foolish.

In L.A., where the sand meets the sea, people have been going around this week with their tongues hanging out and seeking refuge from the heat in ice cream parlors and shopping malls.

But up in the high desert, where the sand meets more sand, people scoff at the ponytailed smoglodytes and ask, what’s the big deal?

Desert dwellers will tell you they are so hardy that when the asphalt begins to melt, they roll the stuff into balls and build summer snowmen. And when it gets so hot that the Joshua trees refuse to hold up their arms for the tourists, an old-timer might be heard to observe, “It’s a mite warm today.”

“ ‘Course it’s a dry heat,” his friends would quickly add.

To be sure, some try to escape the high temperatures. They go out to restaurants, not for the food but for the air conditioning. Or they kick their children out of their baby pools and flop down in four inches of water.

Still others, more adventurous, visit the Cactus Inn near Littlerock Reservoir, where people sit breathlessly--the bar has no central air conditioning--placing bets on where a chicken in a cage will defecate next.

“The former owner thought of that one,” said bartender Kathy Langley, 41, of Littlerock.

But a fair number of people regard the question over how they cope as a foolish one. Yeah, it’s hot, so what? is their attitude.

“We’re a tougher lot up here,” said Joyce Edmondson, who works in the open air at the Green Pastures Drive In Dairy in Lancaster, which advertises ice cream bars for sale by the dozen. Edmondson said her family is from the South Bay.

“How can you stand it here?” they asked when they visited a while back. Now they too live in the Antelope Valley.

“You get weathertized,” is how Edmondson describes the way people deal with the baking, day-after-day heat. Edmondson moved to town 30 years ago--”back before they had stores”--and the hottest day she could remember was one during which the mercury reached 122.

Now that was hot, she said. “I thought I died and went to Hades.”

Those who think the Antelope Valley is in fact a suburb of Hades should know that many people up here thank their lucky stars every night that they got out of Los Angeles.

“This a better place to raise kids,” said Jill Busse, 34, of Lancaster, whose small son played in the water Thursday at Littlerock Reservoir, a popular escape.

“It’s hot, but it’s a dry heat,” she said. “Yesterday, I turned on the air conditioner for the first time. My attitude is not to use air conditioning because it spoils you.”

The area’s sure-it’s-hot, now-let’s-get-down-to-business attitude is everywhere. Thursday had been one of the hottest days of the summer, yet the weather didn’t make the front page of the local paper. On Friday, the high at Edwards Air Force Base, according to a radio report, was 108 degrees. A few hours later, the temperature fell a few degrees.

“It’s only 102 degrees out there,” the disc jockey reported. Better button up those coats.

Karen Durant, 35, of Lancaster was having a drink at the Cactus Inn, where a “swamp cooler”--an appliance that cools by blowing air past water--was waging a losing battle against the heat outside. But she hardly noticed it.

“It’s much better here than L.A,” she said. “At least you get clean air. . . . The wind comes up every day at 3 p.m. and cools you off.”

Each person seems to have a different way of cooling off when it gets Antelope Valley hot.

Dennis Heltzel, 21, of Lancaster said he and his friends go to the reservoir. Or they might go out to dinner. The first question they ask is not how is the food, but how is the air conditioning?

“Marie Callender’s is really good,” he said.

The reason, according to general manager Michael Brannon, is that the company took care to install three industrial air conditioning units to cool a relatively modest dining area.

“A lot of customers do say it’s too cool,” he said.

When waitress Peggy Eskew, 30, of Lancaster gets too hot, she runs out back and hops in her children’s baby pool. “There is a little baby slide on it and I slide down that,” she said.

People in the Antelope Valley are “more rough around the edges” than in Los Angeles, she said.

Durant said she likes to water her 100-by-80-foot garden until it is a swamp.

“Then I wade through the corn,” she said. “Instant coolness.”

But if you think the desert folks are hardy today, Edmondson remembers the old days, when people didn’t even have swamp coolers.

“We must have really been tough,” she said.

Or perhaps it was just that it was an even drier heat.

Desert Heat Here is a look at the record and average temperatures for Palmdale based on weather statistics dating back to 1951.

* Hottest day was July 14, 1972: 113 degrees

* Coolest summer day was June 2, 1967: 35 degrees

* Average summer high: 94.7 degrees

* Average summer low: 61.8 degrees

* The average July high: 97.7 degrees

* The average July low: 65 degrees

Source of data: WeatherData Inc.