There is a reason why I left the San Joaquin Valley.
When I was a kid and it was some 110-degree day, I asked my mother why on Earth my family picked Fresno, Calif., to move to. She shrugged her shoulders. Someone in Fresno had offered to sell them a restaurant in the city and they took the offer. After they sold the restaurant several years later, they were pretty much settled in the area.
And Fresno apparently wasn’t that bad of a place in the early 1960s. By the late 1970s, it had become clogged with traffic, terribly crime-ridden and one of the smoggiest places on the planet.
But, it had always been hot. That didn’t come out of nowhere. Fresno has been hot since the days of Joaquin Murrieta. What you experienced this past weekend would be an average San Joaquin Valley weekend … in mid-May. By, June, it was 100 every day. Every … single … day. By July, it was 108-112 every day. By August, you were ready to murder people for looking at you wrong.
The solution for the heat was to shut all the curtains and blinds and hunker down in air-conditioned homes, cars and workplaces. For 24 hours a day. You would avoid going outside at all costs. If you played golf, you’d make sure to get a 7 a.m. tee time to get done by 10:30 a.m.
Most homes had swimming pools, either above ground or built in. You’d go outside after noon only if you were headed to a swimming pool somewhere.
You’d live like that for three solid months out of the year.
Some people love the heat, but frankly, I found it a miserable way to live. I hated it. I wanted to be outdoors all the time. And I left that climate the first chance I got. There’s a reason I settled in the Pacific Northwest.
Some summers, I feel like the smoke and the heat have followed me up here. They found me.
This weekend was a reminder to me of how awful that kind of heat can be. I did a short hike at Lyre River on Friday and I was absolutely drenched with sweat on the way back. I had to stop and catch my breath every couple of hundred yards. I’m having some issues with my knees that are slowing me down lately, but this was ridiculous. That is an easy, flat trail less than 2 miles long that I usually do in a brisk 35 minutes, but I was completely bonking in the 90-degree heat.
There was no escape
The Lefties cut short one of their nonleague games due to the heat. Now they’re off to 115-degree Yakima, where there is at least some air conditioning. Lefties owner Matt Acker had a good point that, in hot areas, air conditioning is the norm, so you can get out of the heat. Here, it’s 24 hours of it. There is no escape. It’s Gilead times the Matrix with a giant Bunsen burner heating it up.
And I keep reminding myself that, to be honest, we had it easy. Our heat was nothing compared to Seattle and Portland. As we’re experiencing the beautiful cool breezes Tuesday, they’re still dealing with some bad heat.
I worry these events are going to become the norm. Like the smoke. I’ve written about this before, that when I lived in the region in the 1990s, we never once had a smoke event. Not once in eight years. Since I returned in 2016, we’ve had some smoke every single summer with the worst being last year’s Doom Eternal-ish week of orange-red skies.
I worry about the effect of these changes on the Olympics, on the glaciers, the rivers, the salmon. This is such a paradise, I hate to see it lost. Unfortunately, the smoke events might be a new reality we have to get used to. I sure hope the “Heat Dome” isn’t another one.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
