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.

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.