My heart rate just came back to normal, and it wasn't from a workout for the backpacking adventure on the JMT. I killed another black widow spider on my green waste container. This time it was inches from my forearm.
Thanks to the Fresno City Council, I no longer have unsightly refuse containers in view of the street. Now they're in the spider-breeding ground in my tiny side yard. You literally have to wear gloves and swat like crazy to throw something in the garbage.
The city passed a law saying you have to hustle your refuse containers back behind your fence on the day the big trucks come around to dump them. You get fined if you don't follow the law. No problem if you have a large side yard. I barely have room for a gate, so I no longer have a skinny, little side yard. I have a jammed, smelly, spider-ridden mess.
And that mess is what I will remember when the time comes to vote for city council members and the mayor.
This fine idea is another in a long line of reasons why Fresno is not just your garden variety wanna-be LA or SF. This place is full of half-baked ideas. But, just so you know, I like Fresno and so I will swat the black widows.
I need to warn you about a few other negatives -- beyond our forward-thinking leaders. Fresno has some of the worst air pollution in the country. Raise a child here, and you're asking for an asthma diagnosis and an inhaler for your little one.
It's oppressively hot in summer. It's drippy, moist, foggy cold in the winter. For some reason, it's still getting expensive to buy a house here.
When I moved here from the East Coast in 1986, I thought the drivers were the slowest bumpkins I had ever seen. That's over. They have caught up with Boston, land of the bashed-in side panel.
OK, let's review, backpackers. Fresno's air is dirty and dangerous, summer is an inferno, the houses are expensive and the drivers can scare you right off the road like any other city in America. And, hey, you better bring up those trash bins or suffer the consequences.
So why live here?
Well, I like the heat and 275 days of sunshine each year. I like the farm fields all around. I like the mellow sunsets on the dusty, smog-laiden horizon. I grew up in Bakersfield. This is like life in my childhood, except there aren't any oil derricks and darn few Buck Owens tunes.
But the biggest advantage is that you can get to Kings Canyon National Park in 75 minutes. And the Yosemite National Park south gate in a little more than 90 minutes. In late March, you can drive through lupine and California poppies in the foothills and 45 minutes later see snow and a half frozen lake.
If you want to backpack one of the prettiest high-country settings anywhere, you can get there in just a couple of hours driving. Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks, along with Sierra and Sequoia national forests, are some of the best reasons to live in Fresno.
The John Muir Trail, at the spine of the Sierra, gets you four of those five places. Yeah, backpackers, I'll take Fresno.
