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.

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.