The center of it all

Before I lived here, I called California The Land of Tiny Dogs.

And The Brown State.

And The Land of Wooden Fences.

And The Nanny State.

I haven’t changed my mind about any of those. Sorry.

But now that I live here, my perceptions of The Golden State are changing. There’s still room for expansion of the list above, but I’m quite enjoying everything I learn about California.

Ron and I moved late last summer to Visalia, the Tulare County seat and the prettiest big little city in the San Joaquin, a.k.a. Central, Valley.

Several of my siblings decamped from our birthplace, Buffalo NY, decades ago to join spouses in the Valley. As grandchildren started arriving, my parents also moved out here.

I resisted the move, preferring the more temperate climate and Old Commonwealth sensibility of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Ron and I met online – without the help of dating sites, thank you very much. He pried me out of Civil War country to live on the old Burke farmstead in central Nebraska.

Red state? Oh, yeah. But conservatism at the heart of the country is rooted (read the pun) more deeply than ideology. Farmers place their trust in God, family and the land, in that order. They love America in ways their cosmopolitan counterparts may never comprehend, but they don’t have a whole helluva lot of confidence in any government or bureaucracy. Independence is more than a history lesson to them. Do for yourself or do without.

But one day we realized that scooping snow sucks. Mowing an acre of grass is sweaty hard work, and gets more laborious and time-consuming every summer. Ditto for fixing fences and chasing stray cattle.

Don’t get me wrong, and don’t laugh at Nebraska’s informal state motto, "The Good Life." It is a very good life, and I learned more there about the big questions in life than I ever learned sitting in university lecture halls.

But it was time to move on. We handed the farm house to the next generation, left the farming in the capable hands of a neighboring farmer, and headed west.

California. A different kind of place, no matter where you’re coming from. Blue state, for starters. Hardly do-it-yourself types, with everything from toilet scrubbing to tax preparation hired out. Lots of sun-cured vegetarians. Six cars for every garage space. Leaf blowers.

Yet for all the differences between this and every other place I have lived, I am finding out that there is much to know and appreciate about California.

From the little gem that is Visalia, I have a center-of-it-all observation point, and a base grounded in the rich agricultural traditions of one of the most fertile valleys in the world. Directly to the east of the city rises the Sierra Nevada, throwing up a formidable wall of stone and tree between California and most of the rest of the nation.

To the west, the Coast Ranges shield Visalia and the Central Valley from many of the social and cultural pressures of the densely populated coastal cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Visalia is a southerly link in the chain of cities along Highway 99, which traverses the flat Valley north to south, Sacramento to Bakersfield. From Visalia, it is easy to get to distant points of this enormous state.

And it’s a pretty place to come home to.