Eau de Toilet

A lot of the horribleness of this town I could probably just come to accept. Maybe not willingly, but eventually I'd have no choice but to make my peace and come to terms with it.

Except when it comes to the smell.

Holy smokes, it stinks today.

Must be a "dead cow burn day".

You would think that perhaps over time you would adapt and it wouldn't be such an issue. But even the locals admit this place reeks. Some days more than others, but on the whole, every day in Bako is a stinker.

And it isn't just the air.

Yesterday I was doing some laundry, including a load of towels. When I got out of the shower this morning, I grabbed one of the clean "fresh" towels and held it up to my face... and nearly wretched.

It smells like it's been dragged through a septic tank.

And that's after having been washed in hot water, with bleach, and fabric softener and another fabric sheet thrown in the dryer for good luck. There are no amount of chemicals you can add to the laundry that will counteract Bakersfield tap water, which smells like it was piped in straight from the sewer. It's probably flammable too; I've never bothered to check.

Really, it's just so demoralizing. Like waking up each day and taking a shovel to the face.

Surf Bakersfield!

"A massive earthquake hits Japan, the largest in over a century. But first... Charlie Sheen appears to have reached a settlement with his estranged wife over custody..."

That was the headline on the morning news. Good to see they have their priorities straight.

I honestly just don't get it. When it comes to earthquakes, the people here seem to be willfully dense. It's all that more surprising since the town was almost wiped off the map by one in 1952.

Maybe it's because in the past 50 years most of the population seems to have immigrated from Oklahoma and they seem more concerned with tornados than quakes. Maybe they're just stupid. Or maybe it's because they've made so little investment in infrastructure that there's not much to lose. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the case of the scary dam at Lake Isabella, northeast of town.

The dam was constructed in 1957, five years after the big quake. By all accounts, corners were cut, which is just Standard Operating Procedure for Kern County. The Army Corp of Engineers rates it as probably the most dangerous dam in the country, but no one here seems to take it too seriously. Last year it was discovered that a major "inactive" fault that lies directly under the dam is, in fact, "active". The response here?

"Meh."

If you're looking for a possible investment you might want to look into "lakefront" property south of town because this is what Bako will look like if the dam fails...



This shows our neighborhood under 5 to 10 feet of water. And it's not from the sprinklers.

When You're Number 2, You Try Harder

Bakersfield: The Second Most Toxic City In America

Damn you, Philadelphia!

There's always next year...

Hicks On Ice

The neighbors got together and created a community ice rink! Isn't that nice? And just in time for the holidays.

Actually, it's strictly by accident. The first of many, I'm sure.

For the past week the overnight temperature in Bako has dropped below freezing, but a little sub-zero weather isn't going to deter the people of Bakersfield from their God-given right to water their lawns for 8 hours. In Bakersfield, a lawn isn't properly watered until you can scuba dive in it. Most people aren't satisfied until their front yard looks like a reflecting pool. The sprinklers usually kick in before dawn. Water sheets over the sidewalks. It pools in the driveways and gutters because the brain trust down at City Hall never quite understood proper drainage. And over the past week, early in the morning, it freezes.

It makes walking the dogs an adventure, I'll say that. I should pick the nicest home and slip in front of it. Mama needs a new pair of shoes.

During the just past election, everyone and their mother was bitching and moaning about getting more water, getting "our fair share". Yet they released a report earlier this year showing that 75% of all the water use in Bakersfield is for landscaping, and the way it's done here that means most of the water just flows into the gutter and down the drain.

Or it would, if they could figure it out.

Vote Early And Often

One week to go until the damn election and it can't come a moment too soon. I've had it up to HERE with the constant barrage of ads. I swear I see Meg Whitman about 10 times an hour and I'm happy to hear whatever "Megmentum" there was has evaporated and it looks like she's going to lose. That was $160 million well spent.

The ads for the local races have only really started ramping up in the past couple of weeks due to the cost of buying ad time in California. That, and the fact they're run more as a reminder to vote than anything else. They're remarkably meek, but that's because there's really no contest here. Kern County is so overwhelmingly Republican that the outcome is pretty much already known. What few Democrats are running avoid mentioning their party affiliation like the plague, and more than a few trot out a string of proud Republicans to vouch for just how un-Democratic they are.

All the real fireworks, locally speaking, came back before the June primary when all the Republicans candidates tried to out-crazy each other to get the nod. Once the roster of lunatics was set it was pretty much a done deal.

Two things have stood out to me about the local races, at least as far as they've played out on TV. Take the ad above for Andy Vidak, who already looks corrupt before even taking office (I'm sure that will come).

"Farmer for Congress"

Is this really a selling point? Unless he's planning on planting cotton between the aisles of Congress I fail to see how being a farmer is superior preparation for elected office. But it must work here because he isn't the only one using this tactic. At least he had the good sense to stay off the tractor, which can't be said of a couple of other candidates.

The other thing I've noticed is almost every single candidate here vows to fight for "OUR FAIR SHARE OF WATER!" The whole idea is both arrogant and dubious. Our fair share of water? That would be about "zero". The central valley is a desert; Bakersfield only gets about 3 inches of rain a year. The only reason is has an agriculture industry is because over the past century they've built canals to steal the water from the Sacramento delta. Using that same logic I should be able to walk into a bank and demand my "fair share" of the money, but I somehow doubt the cops would find that a convincing argument.

Baku #10: Tap Water

The bath tap gurgles.
The water runs brown, like dirt.
That can't be good, right?

Helter Swelter

The temperature has been flirting with triple digits for weeks now and finally crossed over on Sunday. And yesterday?

108 degrees.

Just when you think life here can't get any worse.

I stayed inside. Even the dogs wouldn't venture out. The air was classified as "unhealthy for everyone" and when you stepped outside it smelled like the toxic stew of Bako was fermenting. And pity my poor boyfriend. He had to work outside yesterday and by the time he came home he wanted to commit hari kari. It was so hot yesterday you couldn't even get cold water out of the tap - the underground pipes were baked. I took a shower without even turning on the hot water.

And the humidity! How the hell is it that this place is humid? It gets nearly zero rain and there hasn't been a drop in months, and yet yesterday it was like Miami in August. What the hell is up with that?

The return of the heat has also brought the return of one of my pet peeves about this place, the first of many. I'm talking about the obscene waste of water. It's absolutely criminal.

I've ragged on Bako for stealing water from up north, but truth be told all of Southern California imports it's water. The difference is that everyone else seems to be abundantly aware of how precarious their position is. The good people of Palm Springs realize they live in a desert and make do with front yards made of rocks and cactus. In LA the water restrictions are so draconian you can only water your yard a handful of hours a week. But here everyone seems to believe they have the God given right to turn their front yards into an Amazonian jungle, and if it means leaving the sprinklers on for 5 hours, so be it.

And they do.


I've taken the dogs out for a walk at 7:30 in the morning and all the neighbors have their sprinklers going full blast. When I've left to run errands hours later, they're still going strong. More people still choose to water in the early afternoon when the heat is so intense the water never even hits the ground, instantly evaporating into the blast furnace air. The end result is that though the lawns all appear lush and green, it's all for show. They're usually so waterlogged they're more kelp bed than lawn - step on it and you're likely to sink in up to your ankles.

Now that I think about, I believe I've discovered the source of the humidity.

A River Runs Through It

Downtown Bako, such as it is, is actually a pretty short drive from our neighborhood. Actually, everything is a short drive from our neighborhood. Everything except my sanity.

To get downtown, you cross a bridge over a wide, shallow, trash filled drainage ditch which I only recently discovered was the Kern River. Or rather, the remains of it. Back in the 50's, when they built the shoddy, soon-to-fail dam at Lake Isabella, the water supply was cut off and it became the civic gulch that it is today. They've added some bike paths along the "banks", if pedaling along a landfill is your thing.

Even though the "river" is but a misty watercolor memory, it hasn't stopped the hucksters and charlatans of this town from coloring it blue on the map like it's a viable body of water. The nearby housing developments sport names such as "River Oaks", "River Run Blvd." and "Roaring River Drive". I don't know if it's an act of brazen deception or delusion, but I pity anyone who buys a house there. Sold on the gauzy image of watching sailboats drift lazily by, they're going to quickly discover that the only thing that floats down the Kern River are shopping bags and Slurpee cups.

When It Rains, It Pours

So it does rain in Bako. Color me surprised. Of course, for the neighbors, that can mean only one thing... time to water the lawn.

I don't understand these people at all.

It's The Water, And So Much More

All these posts about the shitty air, and not a single one about the shitty water. I'm being remiss.

We get mineral water here. Oh no, not the fancy schmancy Pellegrino stuff. I'm talking real minerals. Probably lead and arsenic too. And God only knows what else. It comes out of the tap white as milk. If you let it sit for about 10 minutes, all the crap it in settles and it resembles "water". But it didn't go anywhere. It's still there... waiting for you. Nobody here drinks it. God no. Not even the locals. The first week we were here I asked a waiter for a glass of water and he looked at me like I just ordered blowfish. If you want to get rich in Bakersfield, go into bottled water.

Most of the houses in this neighborhood sport wooden fences between them, and walking the dogs through the 'hood, you can't help but notice that wherever the sprinklers hit the fences, they've become bleached bone white. And then you think... "I bathe in this crap!" Wash my clothes. Do the dishes. Maybe it's something that occurs naturally. I doubt it - nothing here appears to occur naturally. Maybe the people up north, watching us steal it and waste it have poisoned it out of spite. Can't say I'd blame them.

I tried to do some research online. I googled "Bakersfield's Shitty Water" and got the City's website, which made me laugh. And there I learned "Anyone who has lived in California knows that water is a precious commodity that has been a source of rivalry between northern and southern California since the early Gold Rush days..." No shit. That's why they steal it.

At any rate, I never found out the secret to our "White Gold". I did find out some other fun facts though. I discovered that the municipal reservoir, Lake Isabella, northeast of Bako, is held back by a dam considered the #1 risk of failure in the entire United States. It even showed a map of what the flood would look like when the dam fails (their word, not mine) and basically Bako will be under 3 or 4 feet of water. Something to look forward to.

So the moral of the story appears to be, if the air doesn't kill you, one way or another, the water will.

The Lawn King 2

Just finishing up my post on the lawns.... It isn't just that. I've never lived anywhere with such disregard for any and all things related to the environment. I don't know if it's the inbred Republican belief that anything related to the environment is a "MSM/Liberal conspiracy", or the fundamentalist biblical mindset that God provided all these wonderful resources for us to waste as we see fit. Probably a toxic mixture of both. Maybe they believe the faster we use it all up, the quicker we'll arrive at their cherished "End Times". Whatever. With toilets that use about 8 gallons a flush, we're gonna get there pretty quick.

The city does offer recycling, surprisingly. But as far as I can tell, it's just a convenient way to identify all the liberals in the neighborhood. For the neighbors. You know... "just in case". I've only ever seen two houses in this entire "development" that use them. And now us. That's gotta be strike number 2....... "They're gay, and.......THEY RECYCLE!"

The Lawn King

My new neighborhood is a rat's maze of impossibly green, manicured lawns. They're all so perfect, at first I thought they were fake. And from what I've been able to discern about the neighbors, that wouldn't have been a bad guess. But no, they're real. Astoundingly real. How on earth, you may ask, does a place that gets only 4 inches of rain a year, and where the average temperature (based on a week's observations) is roughly 120 degrees, manage to have such lush greenery?

Water, my friends.

Oh, not THEIR water. OTHER people's water. Water here is imported, or about 99.9% of it is. This is a desert. AND.... we're in a drought. But no one here is going to let those little facts get in the way of having putting green front lawns. And the key to having a putting green front lawn is to water it... Bako style. Essentially, what you do is turn on your sprinklers, preferably in the middle of the day (so that most of it evaporates) and... walk away. For hours. Just leave it on. Only once your lawn takes on the consistency of a kelp bed, and languid waves of water wash across the sidewalk, over the curb and down the gutter, only then do you turn them off. And every does it! Oh sure, there are rebels...... people who do it in the morning or evening. But they all do it.

Coming from a city that restricted turning on you hose to only two days a week, before 9 and after 4, I was gobsmacked. Drought? Overdevelopment? Importing water? Global warming?Who cares! I can putt from my front door!

But there is a bright side...