The Fifth Dimension

“Ok Mother Nature, you’ve had your fun. Time to move on.”

So read the tweet from a Bakersfield resident and writer whom I follow on Twitter. Accompanying her complaint was a photo of the thermometer in her back yard. The needle touched 100 degrees – a low-end-of-normal temperature in the good ol’ summertime, but mid-September?

The Age of Aquarius, the golden era of happy, hopeful water-bearers, dawned here in California, but the heart of the hippie movement was in foggy, soggy San Francisco. Frank Sinatra’s tramp who hated California for its cold and damp obviously never left the coast.

It’s supposed to be hot and dry here in the Valley, but even the natives and the fully acclimated recently started complaining about it. Some freak high pressure system was keeping the Valley cooking on “high” beyond the normal summer expectations. Temps have just started to cool off a bit – today’s expected high in Visalia is 93. That seven degrees will make a big difference in our electricity bill.

But there is one huge advantage to a hot, dry climate, one I never anticipated when I demanded a backyard pool as a major condition for moving here: scooping doggie delights off the lawn.

I did that off and on for twelve years on our Nebraska farm, and solidly another five years before that in Fredericksburg. In Virginia, forget it, the humidity and rain keeps the stuff soft and pungent. Picking it up requires full hazmat gear.

And no tiny dog for me, with little raisin droppings. I had a German Shepherd-Golden Retriever mix, a big, powerful dog with big, powerful poop. There’s nothing like a brisk walk to stimulate a dog into letting it go. To gather it up, I used the long plastic wrappers that swaddled my Washington Post when it hit my doorstep every morning, swapping one bag of BS for one of DS. Today, they call that “repurposing.”

Jello, my Virginia dog, had a thick, gorgeous red coat well-suited to Nebraska winters. She did her business at first close to the house, requiring a couple months of picking up after her, but once she realized she had the run of 160 acres, she chose remote locations in the pasture and along the gravel road.

Tough winter weather forced her closer to home once in a while, but temperatures that occasionally bottomed out around -20F froze those biscuits solid. Cleanup was just picking up chunks of black ice.

Blue, our current and much-beloved mutt, eventually came to the same realization as Jello, and let it go out in the pasture. During the car trip to California, I was a little apprehensive about getting him to do his business on a traveling schedule. This dog had little notion even how to walk on a leash, never mind poop on command. Turns out Mother Nature takes care of these things and we had no trouble during the trip.

I wasn’t wild, either, about the prospect of daily cleanup from the fence-enclosed quarter-acre that is our Visalia estate. Blue was reluctant to mess his close environs, but once he did, we both had an astounding revelation: Here in the Valley, cleaning up doggie dump is an entirely different matter. Literally. The stuff desiccates super-fast in the hot, dry air of the Valley, and turns into chalk within the space of a few hours in this near-desert climate. Step on it, and it crumbles and blows away. Collecting it and disposing of it is hardly the offensive chore it used to be.

You can keep your Age of Aquarius. Let the sun shine.

West Coast Offense

Up at quarter after five every morning to milk cows and gather eggs. As a kid growing up on the farm, Ron dreamed about the days when he had a city job and could sleep in to a decent hour. A couple of decades later, living in New Jersey, he was getting up at quarter after five to catch the commuter train into Manhattan. By the time he retired a couple of decades further on, he was sleeping in a whole 45 minutes later, getting up at six to catch the commuter train into Chicago.

Ron happily threw his alarm clock away when he retired back to Nebraska. He would stay up until one or two in the morning, surfing the Web and listening to music. His morning wake-up time pushed later and later, into ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. It took a while for my morning person and his night owl metabolisms to blend, and they did only by my practice of gradually staying up later and later. I still tend to wake up fairly early, thus making myself sleep deprived, but the fun we have together makes up for it.

For a good fifteen years, Ron was the master of his own fourth dimension. The only schedule he really had to worry about was that of his beloved Nebraska Huskers football games, televised every Saturday during the fall. Aside from the occasional eleven a.m. start, morning was irrelevant to him. I, too, enjoyed the Central Time Zone. With the late night news finishing a whole hour earlier, “The Tonight Show” started at 10:30. I was actually awake to watch it. Monday Night Football started at eight, not nine. I had a chance to enjoy a little of it before nodding off.

So then we moved two time zones farther west. For most television viewing, this is a real bonus. East Coasters have to wait at least until nine p.m. for many of their favorite shows to air. I’m cooking supper when Monday Night Football kicks off. Were I still in Fredericksburg, Virginia, I would sleep through most of “Project Runway.” Out here in the Pacific Time Zone, the designers start sniping at each other at six. It’s still light out.

For Ron, this is a problem. An eleven a.m. home start for the Huskers means getting up before nine o’clock, here on the West Coast. And what about all those other college games, a day-long football extravaganza? A true fan, such as Ron, keeps an eye on all actual and potential opponents. Before one Saturday football fest has ended, he knows which games he wants to watch next week. East Coast games that start before noon start airing here around eight in the morning. All the pre-game hoopla begins even earlier.

But I’ve got my X’s and O’s charted. I’ll shake him awake before the sun is very high, prop him up in his chair, stick a cup of coffee in one hand and the TV remote in the other, and head out to the kitchen to start making football snacks.

Ready for some football? Yeah, we’re ready.

Cat Dickens hid his head as the Huskers lost to the UCLA Bruins on September eighth.

It's a dry heat

Four of the words I used to roll my eyes at: It’s a dry heat.

In my book, they were akin to “New and Improved,” three words which, when boldly printed across a familiar package, are an instant red flag. That product is hardly new, and most certainly not improved. In fact, it is likely to be inferior to and less effective, yet more expensive, than the old version.

“It’s a dry heat” holds out a promise similar to “new and improved.” Yes, it’s hot, the words imply, but you will not drown in your own sweat here, the way you might in Georgia, or Florida.

I don’t like sweating. I sweated my way through my childhood in Western New York, my young adulthood in Virginia and Maryland, and I sure as heck sweated plenty in the green corn-scented summer vapors of Central Nebraska, the first twelve years of my wedded bliss.

I know sweat.

I would exercise more if I didn’t sweat doing it. Warm water, squeezed out of my own pores, trickling down my temples, my back – ugh. I cannot comprehend the allure of saunas; I marvel at people who eagerly carry their own special sauna towels and slippers into the gym or the spa, or – egads! – who intentionally construct these cramped, hot sweatboxes in their homes. Volunteer sweating? Even worse, in a seated, relaxed position? Why?

To me, sweat and heat go together. I sweated plenty in those “Christmas Story” -style snowsuits when I was kid playing outside during the winter, but I didn’t know I was sweating until I got into the warm house. Sweat came automatically during the humid Western New York summers, no exertion required.

After my parents moved to California, my mother used to try to lure me out to the Central Valley, with those words. “It’s hot, but it’s a dry heat.”

Yeah, that’s what makes ovens so effective. “Dry heat” is still bloody hot.

I actually enjoy rain and wind and snow, most of which are negligible in or entirely absent from the Valley. Fortunately, so is high humidity. Back in Nebraska, you really become aware of humidity when it hits 65 percent and higher. Around here, people start complaining when – and if – it hits 45 percent. It just doesn’t happen very often; people are not accustomed to sweating with their heat.

And heat they have plenty of. Here in the Valley, heat warnings don’t go out until daytime temps routinely top 105, and nights don’t drop below seventy. Here, in summer, you’ll get hotter water out of your cold water tap than your hot water heater. Hummingbirds appreciate bubbling hot nectar as a refreshing, cool drink.

I recall one long, long drive with my grandmother in my brother’s car from the San Francisco Bay area to Mom’s house in Visalia. The catch? No air conditioning in the car. The temperate climes of the coast dropped farther and farther behind us while ahead of us the Central Valley landscape shimmered in waves of heat. Grandma withered into her seat as the temperature climbed into the mid-nineties, the high nineties, then topped out at 106. We stopped at a convenience store for drinks. Grandma insisted she was fine and didn’t want anything. I bought her a can of Orangina anyway. Grandma never drank it; she pressed the cold can to her forehead.

For years, then – decades, even – I gave every excuse I could think of for why I could not visit my parents and the rest of my family who had migrated to California. They all knew the real reason: it’s hot. Dry or not, it’s hot.

So it wasn’t the dry heat that finally lured me and Ron out here last year. It was family. But with a pool for backup to our air conditioning unit, I was chugging along just fine in this dry heat. Until recently when, in the middle of a genuine Valley heat wave, our 20-year-old air conditioner went kaput.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, before we topped out around 108 outside, I noticed that the air conditioner had yet failed to achieve our cooling temperature; it was about two degrees warmer inside than the thermostat was set for. By five p.m., it was five degrees warmer. We knew we had a problem.

Needless to say, summer is the busy season for air conditioning specialists, and we feared a long, hot delay in getting the AC fixed. We had the great good fortune, however, to get someone in almost immediately, and within two days, our old unit was out, a new one was installed, and we were cooling again. Hats off to Weathertech of Visalia for their speedy response, fine work and reasonable price. Thanks, Vincent and son!

In the meantime, much to my surprise . . . I discovered there’s something to those four words:

“It’s a dry heat.”

Had the air conditioner failed on the farm back in Nebraska in the middle of August, my eyeballs would be sweating as I looked at the thermostat. After 30 minutes, I would be complaining about how unbearably hot it was, how uncomfortable I was.

Here in the sweat-free, semi-desert of California’s Central Valley, I remained pretty comfortable for a day and a half. The house grew warmer and warmer, yes, but with no humidity to speak of, it barely registered on my sweat misery index. I checked the thermometer upstairs just to marvel at how little I cared about how hot it was getting. In fact, within a few minutes of paddling into the pool, I was shivering in its 86-degree ice bath.

Could I possibly have acclimated to this dry heat? This winter, as daytime high temperatures plummet to about sixty, will I be shivering and complaining about the cold? Will I actually feel forced to wear socks with my sandals?

Recently, Ron and I spoke with a former Valley resident who now lives in coastal Los Angeles. When he was invited to linger a few hours longer in the Valley for a nice visit, he quickly declined, citing his inability any longer to bear the oppressive heat.

Dude, get over it.

It’s a dry heat.

Waiting for the rain

                                          Singin' in the rain.

Bread, milk, toilet paper.

BMT – that’s how two "shock jock" deejays in Washington, D.C. summed up the panicked rush that paralyzed the metro area at the first mention of a winter storm. Never mind that most "storms" coming through the area barely produced four inches of wet snow which, within a few hours, would melt and swirl down the storm sewers; most of the population of five million besieged every grocery, hardware and convenience store to wipe them out of snow shovels, ice melt, beer, potato chips and, of course, the BMT staples. One car dealer even reported a spike in sales of four-wheel-drive vehicles in the couple of days prior to storms.

For this native of blizzard-prone Western New York, snow in the D.C. region barely registered. Historically, however, the area averages nearly 40 inches of precipitation annually, yet during the last couple of years I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the region was visibly wilting under a prolonged drought.

I fretted, waiting for the rain. I lived in a place where generous rains had pushed green jungle over Civil War battlefields, where flowers bloomed through three seasons of rain. I worried about the implications of no rain in a place where it was supposed to rain.

Then I met Ron, who promised me that there would be plenty of snow in Nebraska, and rain would bless the spring and early summer. He told me stories about ferocious Great Plains blizzards, followed by flooding along the Big Blue River, the creek that ran through the Burke homestead. I looked forward to living again in a place where it was supposed to rain.

We did have some scary snow storms, and our little creek spread a quarter mile wide in springtime a couple of times, but within a few years of moving to Nebraska, drought there dried up the Big Blue, driving away the herons and the beavers. We had seen flocks of migrating geese, hundreds of thousands at a time, but now they diverted their route to find and follow running water. High drifts sculpted by icy winds belied how little snow was falling on the farm. The legendary, bone-chilling cold of the Great Plains disappeared. Throughout most of the winter months, I was comfortable leaving the house warmed only by a heavy sweatshirt and sneakers.

I was still waiting for the rain, but the effects of global climate change were becoming more pronounced across the nation. And, as the climate scientists had predicted, the weather became more unpredictable. By the time serial blizzards struck the Great Plains during the winter of 2009-10, I was shouting, "Let it snow!"

Heat and drought returned to the nation’s heartland this summer, but I am no longer there to worry about it. I moved, instead, to a place where heat is the norm and rain is almost mythical. I don’t have to worry about the lack of rain in the Central Valley of California; it’s not supposed to rain here.

Whatever your impressions or feelings about Nebraska, it is kryptonite to one class of persons: weather geeks. Aspiring meteorologists flock to the state, only to be confronted by the reality that TV weather guys already there never move on or retire. Even as global climate change accelerates, Nebraska is every weather geek’s dream: tornados, blizzards, hail, sub-zero temperatures and heat indices soaring beyond 100 F – real weather guys live for this stuff.

By contrast, I think people who come to the Valley to forecast the weather have different dreams, the kind that don’t require so much time on the job. The biggest weather challenge around here is finding new ways to say, "Sunny and hot." There is absolutely no reason to wait up for the late local weather news. There is no weather "news," just more of the same.

The average annual precipitation in Visalia is eleven inches, and none of that is snow. People here are taken by surprise when it rains. Excited texts and phone calls fly back and forth across the city: Is it raining at your house?

So I am struck by an apparent anomaly I regularly see here: Umbrellas.

Umbrellas, everywhere. More umbrellas in use, every day, than I ever saw in Nebraska’s slushy snows or Virginia’s downpours.

Umbrellas shading outdoor cafes. Umbrellas as mobile shade for pedestrians. Umbrellas here are seldom employed in their traditional use. Though marketed as "umbrellas," they would more properly be called "parasols." Their primary use here is to create shade in a place where shade is a precious commodity.

Absolutely my favorite use of umbrellas around Visalia is to shade flowers. Yes, flowers. The first time I saw umbrellas propped in a beautifully landscaped yard, I thought they must have been abandoned there by kids as toys. Then I realized that, day after day, they were never removed. And they were generally oriented toward the west, in a location where the afternoon sun would burn fiercely. And underneath each nestled pretty blossoms.

Nobody here worries that their plants will not get enough sun. The bigger concern is that their elaborate landscaping will fry under relentless sun and heat. And underneath these flower canopies, irrigation systems hydrate and nourish each plant on a carefully regulated schedule.

Around here, there is no use waiting for the rain.