smoggy davis

The first summer I spent in Davis was like no other I had ever experienced. Growing up in England meant bright sunny June days with cut grass in the park, orange ice lollies and bumblebees, followed by grey rainy June days with damp mud in the park, heinz tomato soup and wasps. It did not ever mean endless desert like weather coupled with the feeling that it may never be cool ever again anywhere in the world. That is what summer in the Central Valley is like, and that’s what it’s like now – only much worse.

We haven’t had rain here since, I don’t know, early February. Now I know I’ll have little sympathy from you rain-sodden English folk, but it’s pretty serious – it’s dryer than ever, which means a perfect recipe for fire – and boy are we on fire. There have been over a thousand fires raging across the state for the past couple of weeks now, most caused by dry lightning strikes, and since then the huge baking Central Valley has been blanketed with thick, nasty hazy smoke, that is going nowhere fast. You can feel it in your lungs, you can see it everywhere, the sunlight has a dull orange tint to it, the sunsets are spectacularly frightening. And now the temperatures are reaching those nasty July heights again, hitting 110 degrees Fahrenheit today (that’s about a million degrees Centigrade, or it feels like it anyway). It’s really quite unfriendly outside.

And pretty unhealthy, which is why we’ve been having Spare the Air days here. On those days, people are encouraged not to use their cars and add to the pollution, but use public transport or simply stay at home. Buses are free, though it means waiting in the thick smoggy heat for one to come. When will it end, I wonder? Well, it won’t rain until, I don’t know, November, and we currently have a drought which means water is scarce for fighting wildfires (though it doesn’t seem to affect those three-times-a-day lawn sprinklers in our apartment complex, the ones that spray even when it does rain), and the state budget is already shot to pieces. Thank goodness for air-conditioning; though if the rolling black-outs start up again, we might not even have that. California, here we come.

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Ok, time for the now-expected pun-based gag. Britain have something similar to Spare the Air days: they’re called Spare the Heir, and on those days tabloids and glossy mags are encouraged not to write anything about Prince William. Especially not Heat.

Poor, I know. But it’s 110 degrees, so I have an excuse.

(By the way, this is my 50th post on this new blog!)