WET TOMATOES

Something just in from Rick, who has been a bit scarce lately:

With the relentless efforts of all the big chain stores and franchises, it is easy to feel that there is no point in going anywhere in this country because it is just going to look and taste like where you already are. The yummy photos in KC’s post about New England show that this is still a long ways from being true and, we can hope, always will be. I have no experience of New England outside of an airport that had been rendered homogenous by corporate dictates. So I’ll offer up instead a few more observations from the left end of our nation, which should at least provide some contrast.

To watch football games, my brother and I always go to the same sports bar. It is not the only one in town or even the nearest, but it is the biggest. And since its alter ego is a dance hall, the seating is all in the center of an open room with the walls covered in big screen TVs. This makes it easy to watch all the games at the same time. There are not too many Chiefs fans around here, but one guy is a regular. He used to live in the KC area, but has been out here for some time. Recently he finally finished his doctorate in statistics. So during Kansas City’s last woeful defeat, we sat and talked math. When he learned that my other stint in grad school was in philosophy, we talked political theory, too. Perhaps this was the only conversation in that bar that featured both abstract algebra and Rawls’ theory of justice. But it is a college town, so perhaps not.

It was a typically warm day and the doors were open. After watching people try to shoo the bugs off their food, our statistician announced that Davis has three seasons. The year starts with the wet season. This is true enough, but slightly misleading. January, and to a lesser extent February, features frequent low clouds and lots of fog in from the Bay and the river delta. It is more likely to drizzle than to really rain. The streets might be continuously wet for more than a week with all of a half inch total precipitation. So I would call it the damp season. And chilly. It will drop below freezing once a decade or so, but lows in the upper 30s are surprisingly common. The rain is all finished by April and we start to move into our next season, the hot season. This one is exactly right. For month after month, we have hot and usually calm days. Clouds are very rare and it never rains. My brother’s office sometimes has a pool to wager on the date of the first measurable precipitation. At least the air is quite dry, and since we are close to the delta, there is often a cool evening breeze. When the clouds finally start coming back and the temperatures drop a bit, we enter our third season: the fly season. Again, the term is apt as all the people in the bar with food could tell you. The reason for the flies is clear enough. All of your canned tomatoes and paste and juice, and all of your spaghetti and pizza sauce and catsup, and probably salsa, too, come from here. There are miles of tomato fields with canneries scattered about. And between field and cannery the trucks go back and forth. They all look alike: semi-tractors pulling two long flatbeds with open-topped hoppers that are dumped by flipping them on their sides. A friend once drove a truck for a season. She said that the company paid a thousand-dollar bonus if you drove the whole season without causing more than a thousand dollars of damage. Few drivers got their bonus. For whatever bizarre reason, the drivers had to do 70 or more hour weeks, and if you ever backed your truck into anything at all, you would cause more than a thousand dollars damage to the truck, what you hit, or probably both.

The tomatoes go to whichever cannery is ready for them or offering the highest price that day, so the trucks crisscross the region. They are piled as high as they can be, and every time the truck hits a bump, comes to a stop, or goes around a corner, tomatoes bounce out. At every rural intersection the corners have little piles of tomatoes. And since the trucks drive right through Sacramento on the interstate in their endless quest for the best deal, the highway has bright orange smears where the traffic squishes the tomatoes to mush. We think of the Midwest as the agricultural part of the country. But in the capital city of California, suburbanites might wash the farm off their car fenders every night.

I was thinking of another local distinction of late. Everybody knows that parts of California are at risk from earthquakes and wildfires and the mudslides that sometimes follow the fires. But after New Orleans, the city at most risk of massive damage from flooding is Sacramento. The city was founded at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. Its early days saw frequent and large floods followed by spells of levee building. The construction was a hodgepodge of efforts that has now spanned more than a century. Some of the levees are as bad as you would expect 100-year-old levees to be. I just watched a TV program that is being passed around on DVD about a potential flood in the city. The scenario was that a large warm winter storm tracked in across the south coast of California and up into the mountains northeast of here. These storms, dubbed Pineapple Expresses, can be big, stable and long lasting. The massive flooding in 1997 that closed many highways for weeks was from such a storm. A Pineapple Express drops lots of rain over a week or two. Even worse, it is warm so the rain falling in the mountains melts snow and creates more runoff. In the TV show, the storm breached the levees in three places around the city. One of these was less than a mile from where a friend lives. This guy is a year or two from paying off his mortgage, after which he plans on buying the rest of his pension and retiring early. His house is small, but worth about a half million. He is far enough from the breach that his house wouldn’t be flattened with the wave of mud from the collapsing levee. But he is far too close to be able to evacuate. He would have about enough time to get his daughter and cat up on the roof to await rescue like all those people in New Orleans did.

After that, I think the similarities to New Orleans might end. Sacramento is a wealthy city in a wealthy state. California has a huge contingent in the U.S. House. Since Sacramento doesn’t meet the minimum standards of flood protection for the private system of insurance to work, the federal government is on the hook for insurance. So I’m sure that my friend will get rescued from his roof. And with the clout of this state, I’m sure he and his neighbors — with their equally or even more expensive houses — will get bailed out. And you, my friends, will do the bailing.