Normally if you want a taste of the tropics in Baker City you need to order a daiquiri or a pina colada.

Lacking rum, I just went for a walk.

A strange stroll it was.

As a longtime dweller in an arid land I choose my garments, before I venture outdoors, based almost exclusively on the temperature and the wind.

Humidity is at best a tertiary consideration, and usually not even that.

(Also, that measurement is shown on my weather station in numbers so small I can’t make out the figure without leaning in close, an awkward move in the space between my bed and the guitar amplifier on which the station sits. My aptitude for interior decorating is comparable to my capacity to concoct sweet cocktails.)

On the afternoon of Aug. 21, with a record-breaking rainfall having recently ceased after sluicing down for several hours, I glanced at the temperature.

It was 65.

That was the coolest reading, for that time of day, in several weeks. I tied a fleece jacket around my waist, although purely as a precaution I didn’t expect to employ.

I recognized within a couple blocks that I needn’t have bothered with the fleece.

It was cool by August standards, to be sure.

Clouds still blocked the sun and the wind was negligible.

But as I started up the moderate grade of Reservoir Road I noticed that beads of sweat had broken out on my forehead, the saltier versions of the blobs of moisture coating the windshields of our cars.

Midway up the hill I felt, as near as I can judge such things, about as I would have felt on a sunny day with the temperature around 80.

Which is to say, sweaty.

The culprit, of course, was humidity.

When I got home after my 50-minute walk I checked the weather station.

90% humidity.

A statistic more associated with palm trees and Corona commercials and beachside bars that look like something from the set of “Cocktail,” the Tom Cruise film that is so quintessentially 1980s they ought to hand out Izod shirts to the audience.

(Or a can of Aquanet hairspray.)

I don’t mean to suggest that the humidity rarely reaches 90% in Baker City.

It does so often.

In winter, when the temperature, like as not, is below freezing.

The air can be that damp even in summer, but only for a brief period around dawn on clear, still days when mist might even form above lakes and ponds.

But within an hour so, as the sun begins to warm the air, the humidity begins its quotidian tumble, likely dipping below 30% — or even below 20% — by the scorching afternoon.

(The “dry heat” so beloved of marketers and other professional concealers of reality.)

A day with 90% humidity in the afternoon is so exceedingly unusual hereabouts that meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in Boise had been kicking the topic around, in their four-times-daily forecast discussions published online, with the palpable fascination of experts contemplating a rare phenomenon in their profession.

Yet even a layperson can appreciate the sheer improbability of even the diminished debris from a tropical storm venturing so far inland, as the remnants of Hurricane Hilary did earlier this week.

It’s akin to a snowstorm in the Sahara.

When I returned from my walk I opened several windows even wider, but the dank air outside wasn’t refreshing.

I did, though, relish the scent of damp sage, cool and astringent.

And my appreciation was renewed for this place and for its climate, so far from the moderating effects of the sea, so protected from the great storms which require vast expanses of sunwarmed water as fuel.

I can scarcely conceive of walking when the humidity is as it was on Aug. 21, yet the temperature, rather than 65, was 90.

I imagine the air, under such conditions, would have a heft to it — that walking through it would require extra effort, as though a blanket soaked in tepid water were in the way and had to be batted aside with each stride.

Even at 65 degrees, on that evening when the hurricane’s tempered remains were moving away, I could sense the weight that moisture adds to the atmosphere.

It was a curious feeling, so unlike a typical August day that is slouching toward dusk.

Clammy.

But I was glad at any rate that the storm took the atypical turn that brought it our way and transformed our near-desert into something quite different.

And perhaps leaving some of us with a thirst for an evening tipple that mixes light rum with the cloying flavor of some impossibly sweet fruit.