The Art of Summer Survival; The Pools of Oakdale

Summers

 Oakdale summers are hot summers; we are not talking eighty to ninety degree warms days punctuating otherwise pleasant, breezy, coastal weather. These are triple-digit summers, the kind we're later proud-to-brag-we-endured summers. Talking about the heat and cautioning others about it- and how we might avoid it - comes to replace 'take care' or 'have a good day.' Instead, we're left with: "stay outta the heat."

These are typically dry times, too, which is supposed to make the climate more bearable. All the same, the offending, imposing heat incinerates any possibility of real interaction with the outside environment. Taking walks involves covering every exposed part of skin, swiftly moving from dark shade-patch to light tree-cover and carrying gallons of water for fear of dehydration.

But it is not as though we actually have to face these treacherous conditions. One can, if they have the privilege of not working in the environment (which so many people do not), just stay inside. And, once done, the rest will too.


Pools

But we like to be outside. To cope, we've institutionalized pool-ing here. Pools serve as an oasis, a recreational opportunity to brave the warm weather, with a relatively certain promise of a cool outlet for these desires.

Pools come in an assortment of shapes, depths, colors, designs, layouts and yard-situations. They are, in a way, the symbol of upper-middle-class success. "We've made it, so let's get a pool."

There are 'doughboys', impermanent pools that sometimes pre-purchasedly inhabit the monstrously immense warehouses of Costco. Doughboys are smaller but a nice compromise, still providing a much needed sanctuary from an otherwise untimely heat-induced fate.

Inset pools have a longer life, and can often reach a greater depth, emanating a sort of religious permanence and a kind of human defiance of the local environmental conditions; it is, as well, a way of bringing and safeguarding water, what is absent, to the home, not even to be consumed but to be leisured in.

Spas and Jacuzzis are mainly nighttime affairs. They play on our bodies ecstatic and comfort-seeking obsession associated with being warmed to a certain temperature. The relax, calming effect of the Jacuzzi simulates that of the Sauna and doesn't require the same level of investment. It is also, status-wise, how one moves from solely having pool; that is, having the ability both to cool on warm days and to warm on cool nights.

Insulating its parishioners from the actual state of the local climate is as much part of enjoying pools as is any recreational activity facilitated by their presence, and the presence of water. It also seems to remind us of a primordial relationship with the stuff that we will never be able to escape, as much property values and urban flight encourage it.


Rivers and Reservoirs

In addition to constructed pools, there are numerous rivers, creeks, reservoirs, and 'naturally'-occurring bodies of flowing or still water. They are to be found both in town and outside of it, and if you move further away, you might even find a dam or two.

These might weave in and around roads or border long expanses of fields and orchards. Often, they are drawn from for irrigation purposes.

It is also widely known that Oakdale survives and thrives largely on the presence of an underground reservoir of clean, flowing water, without which, we might be be in the same situation in which unknowingly citizens of LA or San Francisco find themselves: up a creek (but really, just dependent on more hinter-landing batteries of thirst-quenching water).

Note: I've included a few photos here, but more will follow

Rain, Rain (Please don't) Go Away: Come Again Another Day

Rain in Oakdale brings a new and different kind of reassuring, if unanticipated calm, and especially now. For some time, California has been experiencing routine and persistent droughts, as if someone on high is holding out on us.

This issue, while an inconvenience to many, is felt all the more acutely in places like Oakdale, where industry is primarily agricultural, and our very subsistence, not to mention general economic improvement largely rests on a key variable over which we have no control.

If there is no rain, there is no Oakdale: the grass would permanently yellow, crops would wilt and perish, and animals would thirst.

Many who live in town are nevertheless often caught unprepared and the normal sartorial precautions one might expect to witness elsewhere are not even given a second thought (as if it were an affront to our sense of personal survivability to actually outfit ourselves in appropriate ways).

Nevertheless, we press on, while the rainclouds pour and the streets fill, patently surprised at the presence of a thing that they are incapable of swallowing: somehow we make it through.

Many are annoyed, but those of us who are doomed to be kids at heart no matter what our age still take pleasure in pushing headlong in pooled bodies of parking-lot street water, lamenting its inevitable dissipation by the unfun gods of City Park and Rec.

Letter to the Editor on "The Park People"

Dear Oakdale,

Having returned recently from a scholarly stint in the bay, I was dismayed to find uprooted public benches, probing Leader articles, impassioned public debate, and a regrettable disdain for the “park people.” To my chagrin, I felt this personally while walking to Cafe Bliss, when I was curtly accosted by nearby store owner who interrogated meanly: “Are you one of those park people?”

I worry that the recent ordinance that diagnoses the issue as alcoholism is only the most recent contribution to the city-wide discourse about the ‘park people’ that has yielded unhealthy discussions about ‘who they are’, these members of our community. It also ignores many of the contributing factors to the development of such a habit, including but not limited to poverty, which is not an individual but a shared, social issue. This ordinance that endeavors to address the issue simplifies the atmosphere of causes and effects and generates a solution that addresses only a small part.

I want us to come to an effective solution like the rest of you. But labeling a complex and multifaceted issue of poverty, social stigmatization, and the rapid disappearance of the public space as one of ‘public drunkenness’ is misleadingly simplistic and infused with failed, outdated prohibitionist values. While treating a loose group of park-goers as “those people” does little more than create unnecessary fissures in our own community. The issue is far from resolved, so let us focus on creating inventive, inclusive solutions, such as shelters, or simply those that treat these ‘people’ as human beings in order to actually be that loving, inclusive Oakdale we purport to be.

(In my search for city council minutes, I also found it quite challenging to obtain a copy, anything after 2012,, which signals a possible but remediable barrier to public knowledge.)

Risk Aversion?

A risk is a risk because it is a risk and not because it is not a risk. This is the way of the world.

All actions are risks because they project us from what is and has been to what is not and what might be; in any case, some actions and engagements are more risky than others, project ourselves further into conditions about which me may know little.

We have an intuitive sense of this risk, to some degree, as attending to our bodies and what they tell us about our performance and our environment's proffered resources, not to mention our ability to confront likely challenges, is a way to read our own aptitude for facing uncertainty.

It is not foolproof, but it is essential, and we can inform and develop this intuitive sense through research, conversation, reflection and writing. Without it, however, we are dead in the rough, incapable of interpreting even our basic abilities to cope with and adapt to our environment.

Blue Orchards, Coming Now

I awoke this morning to an endless sea
Of blue orchards, opening up before
me. In the distance I could hear a few
(but perhaps there were more,
who knew, really?)
roving mechanical beasts, threshing and
thrashing belligerently, defiantly.

They were coming for me. I could hear
them, approaching, interminably slowly
but with a trembling certitude, a predictable rhythm.
The moment of harvest was upon us.

Hopefully, my windows would hold, though I knew
the shades would falter; they were far too weak
for creatures of that size, animals of that stature.

In the pool of water before me, slight ripples in the
water began to form, widening and narrowing.
They were trying to trying to warn me, like a long-
distance radar.

I wanted to heed their kind, silent signals
But I was paralyzed. I would confront them
here and now, and they would no longer
haunt me...

While the wind blew softly, little more than
a breeze felt upon the cheek.

The General Aesthetic of Oakdale - Chapter 1

Descriptions of Oakdale are typically cast in a pall of the mundane. Fitted neatly into the amorphous category of 'natural,' the physical environment that characterizes this place is what is unique to it. Long, rolling and sometimes verdant but mostly beautifully and subtly golden brown pastures encircled by distant fences and miniature four-legged animals belie the uncultivated view that there isn't much to appreciate here.

So too, the sky illuminates the place at night in a way no street light can, drawing our gaze upward, revealing the moon and a blanket of patched stars and constellations, a canopy of light redolent of the sacred. This is the physical environment of Oakdale, but there is yet more.

The built and constructed environment deserves as much attention, with cowboy boots, hats, saddles, spurs and so many other objects decorating the town, with varying degrees of ostentation. Some proudly wear encrusted, adorned, and sculpted versions of these western accoutrements, sometimes even insignia-d. The local economy generates interest in such artifacts as relevant targets of artistic investment and interest.

People 'need' (to a degree) collaborate with animate and inanimate objects in order to complete their productive projects in order to remain participants in the strictures and pressures of the political economy and to maintain a spot in the tradition and history of this place. Continuing the family line is also of high priority, as it is part and parcel of their place in the community, implicated in a process of resisting incorporation into non-native, non-local ventures that comforts the people who live there, as they think on what distinguishes Oakdale, aside from its convenience as a stop on the way to Yosemite.

Art and political economy are interrelated in important ways here, explaining the emphasis on certain kinds of artifacts and rebutting the claim that there isn't anything aesthetically redeeming here. There are just different objects, different practices, and often ones foreign to novice spectators, the exact kind that are prone to ill-informed speculative judgments that render a place ill-equipped to satisfy their sense of taste or judgement

Aesthetic appreciation, as much as any other activity requires time and focus, attention and effort for attuning oneself to the rhythms of a particular world, their relevant details and what makes them significant. It is about a disposition as much as it is about an object being shiny or beautiful or melodious that makes them noteworthy.

Art objects are defined as such (and further defined as worthy of interest) by certain community-proclaimed authorities, but once we realize that we can all be authorities on these items to some degree on these subjects, then we will be entering a new stage of re-creating this world in the image of ourselves but all of ourselves, including the environment and the flora and fauna that inhabit it, who, like each of us, plays as much of a role in recreating certain parts of it as we do. We should treat experts as authorities, but we should also maintain confidence in our own abilities, as these are real and present in ways that are not readily nor appropriately jettison or scraped.

 (there are so many details that each of one of us focuses on that others fail to appreciate, and it is the successive appreciation by new and different people and communities of this place (and others) that discloses and selects different aspects of the environment, of the social and nonsocial world, that really determines what we produce and leave to the generations that succeed us, our ways of making intelligible the world, describing and reconstituting it)

Pipe Dream-ing

Flight (1) .......................................300

Apartment rent (1 mo)...................900.....(x4=3600)

Groceries (1 mo)...........................120.......(x4=480)

Transportation (1 mo).....................50.......(x4=200)

Discretionary money.....................100.......(x4=400)

Courses........................................200

New stuff......................................300     

Total................................................................5480

Savings......................................4000

Income (1 mo)............................1600............6400

Net..................................................................4920

Research

- alternative apartment options (furnished, preferably)

- general new york living guides

- trip for spring 2014, summer 2014