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.

Destination shopping

Grandpa Ed's clock takes pride of place atop our dining room IKEA storage. Great-Grandpa George Burke bought the clock around 1880, but Ron grew up with it tick-tocking on Grandpa Ed's mantel.

                       IKEA

(Sung to the tune of "Maria," from West Side Story)

IKEA...I just shopped a store called IKEA...

And that old shopping game

Can’t ever be the same

For me.

OK, I adore IKEA. I first discovered the Swedish Wonder Store when I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and shopped IKEA in nearby Woodbridge. Ron, 50% Swede himself, was skeptical that a giant furniture store could cook, but one bite of IKEA’s Swedish meatballs and he was a convert.

I had no beef with driving nearly 550 miles from the farm in Nebraska to a Chicago suburb when I needed cabinets to contain my scrapbooking sprawl. The IKEA in Bloomington, Minnesota, was a little closer, at 464 miles, but we have friends we like to visit in and around Chicago, making it the obvious choice.

I don’t know exactly what the store taps in me and gazillions of other IKEA idolizers around the globe. Perhaps it’s the promise of order imposed on a big, sloppy world by one humble Allen wrench. Maybe it’s their skill at making every shopper believe she is a design and organization genius. Could be the meatballs.

There are eight IKEA stores in California. Eight! Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida all come in a far-distant second, with three locations each. Illinois’ two locations are both in the Chicago area; the rest of Illinois can just lump it.

Eight IKEAs in California! I’m positively giddy. Yet from my new home base in Visalia, it’s still a pilgrimage of at least 179 miles, three hours’ driving time, to reach the nearest IKEA in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles. My next closest option is 216 miles straight up the Valley to West Sacramento. A store in Palo Alto is actually a few miles closer, but farther away due to traffic time.

So what gives? I smell bias here.

We moved here from near Stromsburg, with a population of some 1,200 people, the largest city in Polk County, Nebraska. One regional health department there serves four counties, Polk, York, Butler and Hamilton, with a total population that doesn’t quite hit 37,000 people. Maybe I can forgive IKEA for ignoring the prime commercial real estate along I-80 in York County, even for snubbing Stromsburg, the Swede Capital of Nebraska.

But here around Visalia, Tulare and Fresno Counties alone boast 1.4 million – million! – people. Throw in Kern County and the city of Bakersfield, and that population base jumps to 2.3 million.

Two-point-three million people aren’t enough to warrant an IKEA? Are you kidding me? Is it just because people around here have to drive by dairies and orange groves to reach their shopping destinations? Is it because 99 percent of the grapes grown around here end up in school lunches, not bottled behind witty wine labels? Is it a country vs. city thing? Is it urban snobbishness that keeps IKEA out of the southern Central Valley? Or is it even – gasp! – the fact that despite its prehistory as an ocean of its own, the Central Valley is totally landlocked, with not a Pacific wave in sight?

All but one of the California IKEA stores are located in coastal cities. The Sacramento store is the only location that could be considered inland, and it’s just a skip from the San Francisco Bay area.

But I can’t lay these accusations on IKEA alone. Most of California seems hardly to know that the Central Valley exists. There’s the coast, the coastal mountain ranges (where you go for all your trendy wine), and then there’s these pain-in-the-neck higher mountains you have to drive through or around to get to Las Vegas.

Omaha, Nebraska.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 68666 (never mind the Antichrist stuff; been there, done that); where are you from?
ME: Stromsburg.
CLERK, smiling broadly: Stromsburg, hey! My uncle lives in Osceola. Yeah, we go to the Swedish Festival in Stromsburg every summer!

San Jose (San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, coastal), California.
STORE CLERK to customer: Zip code 93292; where are you from?
ME: Visalia.
CLERK, bewildered: Is that in California?
ME: It’s about 40 miles south of Fresno.
CLERK: Fresno?
ME: City in the Central Valley? About 450,000 people?
CLERK, brow clearing, dismissive shrug: Oh! Small town.

I did not make that up.

C’mon, IKEA. Uphold that Swedish reputation for lack of prejudice. Visalia (pop. 124,000), planted at nearly the halfway mark between Fresno (450,000) and Bakersfield (347,000) seems to me the ideal location to tap a pretty sizeable market base.

Välkommen!

IKEA responds (via email, May 24):

Hello Kate,

Thank you for your interest in IKEA. We appreciate that you have taken the time to contact us.

We are constantly in discussions with city, developers, and brokers about potential opportunities for an IKEA store. However, with only 37 stores in the U.S., we focus on new location areas to be consistent with our U.S. and global expansion strategy.

(Approximately 15-20 stores open worldwide each year and we must balance our emphasis on variety of regions and countries around the world.) 

That being said, we do recognize the customer base that would exist for us in many areas, but currently have not committed to a timeframe for opening an IKEA store in your local community.

Of course, we appreciate demonstrations of support and desire for us to enter the local community.  We continue to evaluate areas that may be appropriate for locating an IKEA store based our unique business model and size of our stores.  In the meantime, you are welcome to visit our current U.S. stores as well as to visit IKEA-USA.com.

We hope this information has been helpful and  thank you again for contacting IKEA.

Best Regards,
Jennifer
IKEA Customer Care Center

KATE says:

Dear Jennifer,

You're a sweetheart for taking my tongue-in-cheek seriously. Just boot Visalia a little higher on your to-do list, huh?

Thanks for responding!

Kate

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.