Californians take summers for granted
By Carl Heintze
Every year in June, Scandinavians celebrate Midsummer Eve, the beginning of the longest period of sunlight in the year. It's a time that coincides roughly with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.
People light bonfires on hills, stay up late and generally have a good time. I suppose if you and I lived in Norway, Sweden or Denmark, we'd celebrate the height of summer, too. Sunlight, after all, is a rare commodity in that part of the world for a good part of the year, just as it is in Alaska.
There's either too much--I can remember waking at 1 a.m. in Stockholm and thinking I had slept until noon--or too little, four months of almost constant darkness. Suicide and alcoholism are twin problems in Norway and Alaska both, maybe for that reason. People get depressed in darkness.
We are used to sunlight, and here in California we are positively spoiled by it. El Niño years are something we find hard to handle and this year, which is supposed to be a La Niña year, we also are having trouble accepting a year without spring.
California is sunlight, right? We don't celebrate Midsummer Eve because we tend to take the sun, the fair skies (even when obscured by smog), the brown hills, the dry stream beds and the regular warmth of a pleasant day for granted.
I've always thought this was the true gold discovered by the Forty-Niners. A lot of them came from the East Coast, and most of them surely came from places where summers were wet and stormy. And winters long, dark and cold.
Even if they never found the gold which was reputed to be lying around on the ground, they did discover the gold in the skies. Generations of immigrants since then have found the same thing, California's true gold.
Hollywood and the movies located where they did because there was almost always natural light with which to make films.
An even more abundant wonder soon began growing in the state's fields and orchards. Oranges, lemons, prunes, peaches, pears, plums, almonds and walnuts, not to mention row crops like lettuce or the vineyards which now spread over the hillsides, make up this hoard.
They're the real nuggets discovered by those who came around the Horn, over the Isthmus of Panama or across the plains, deserts and mountains. Or even those who arrived in a jetliner or an automobile.
Now all of us, immigrants and natives, take the endless summer of California for granted.
We believe every day is Midsummer Eve. When it isn't, we pout and complain. Oldtimers, who remember California between the wars as a rural paradise, groan even more loudly than the rest, for they saw the land when it was cheap, when almost anything would grow if you stuck it in the ground, when there was plenty of water to go around and the only problem was to find enough people to harvest the bountiful crops.
Even during the Depression, California was a rural paradise. The problem then was not that there weren't places to use the sun's bounty, but that there were few who could afford to buy what was raised.
Now, of course, it is different. In the valley once called Heart's Delight, where anything would and did find fertile soil, we now raise silicon chips. The fertile black soil is covered with houses that cost too much, and even the brown hills of summer are being surmounted by buildings.
And on the other side of the mountains, in the great Central Valley, where a vast amount of the nation's food is grown, California is facing the increasing encroachment of urban life. Like iron filings attracted to magnets, houses are creeping out along the north-south freeways and substituting people for crops.
We're in danger of losing the gold. We seem to want not to treasure it, but to burn it.
Let's hope that doesn't happen. Let's hope that in finding and enjoying the Golden State we don't turn it into dross.
Because if that happens, we may, in some not-too-distant future, have to burn bonfires on hilltops in an attempt to remember the sunlight of what seemed to be an eternal summer, but was really only a little interval of light in a time of darkness.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
