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Mar. 29, 2007 Some people who live in the eastern and midwestern parts of the US seem to entertain the notion of a 'warm, sunny California'. If there is a 'warm, sunny California', it must be in some other location than the California I know, which is almost always too cool, and very cloudy and foggy much of the time. I too was of the persuasion that California was a land of golden sunshine, warm throughout the year, and not only that, but very glamorous, with actors and actresses walking down the street. It was also sleek and streamlined, modern and sophisticated, in my imagination. There were no old buildings, no ramshackle neighborhoods, no tumbledown tenements. Those ideas began to change when I moved there the first time in 1989, though I had visited California for brief stays several times from about 1960 on. At the present, I have 10 years of California under my belt. I'm not necessarily suggesting that this is a bellyful of California. There certainly are worse places weatherwise. One has to think only of New York, New Jersey and New England, not to mention those more dreadful states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas. My ideas arose as the consequence of an aggressive sales program to attract people to the sparsely inhabited west of the 1950's. People with land to sell, people offering vacation packages and others standing to make a profit oversold California. They 'hyped' it. Once an idea like that gets lodged in your brain, it is very difficult to disabuse yourself of it. My first realization came in 1986, when I had to kill 12 hours in San Francisco, during a layover in my flight from New York to Honolulu. Why, I asked myself, is the temperature here only 58 degrees on the first of August? Then I arrived in Santa Monica on January 29, 1989. The temperature was the same old 58, but I said to myself that this was very good for January. But when I went to the beach to lie in the sunshine a couple of days later, with a temperature in the low 60's, when it is just barely warm enough to do so, I was introduced to Los Angeles fog, which appeared quickly out of nowhere and hung about for hours. Unfortunately, the fog appears like that maybe 50 to 100 times a year. And that 58-degree temperature hangs around 9 months of the year. Then I put in three and a half years in San Diego. This is just the bottom of the world in my opinion. In some years it is cloudy and foggy practically every morning from March till July. This is no exaggeration. I actually counted cloudy mornings one year. There were two consecutive months that had only one sunny morning apiece. The other months in that time-frame may have had two to five sunny mornings. The fog and clouds generally clear up by 10 AM, but sometimes it's noon or 2 PM. This clearing-up explains why San Diego's percentage of possible sunshine, 68%, is as high as it is. Still this is low compared with Las Vegas, Tucson and Phoenix, which have 85%, and Yuma, which has 90%. LA gets 73% and San Francisco 66%, which look good to somebody from New York, where the figure is only 58%. Also, I discovered that in San Diego there are only about 2 or 3 evenings a year when the temperature is as high as 70. I used to cycle there in biking shorts. The temperature was always in the upper 50's or lower 60's at night, even at the height of summer. This cloudiness and coolness follows the Pacific shore all the way from Seattle to Santiago, apparently. Yes, even Lima, Perú, only about 800 miles from the equator, is cool and cloudy 3 to 6 months of the year, with temperatures in the 60's. And so is Santiago, Chile. It's cold and cloudy in Santiago today, though we're only a week into autumn. The west coast is also characterized by much more desert. Rainfall is slight to evanescent along much of the Pacific, except Central America. In Antofagasta, Chile, sometimes there is no rain whatsoever for decades on end. I can't figure this. Is this due to the Rockies-Andes range? Is it oceanic currents? Is it prevailing winds from the Pacific? It seems that the cities with the most desirable temperature range are all on the Atlantic: Rio de Janeiro, Belém, Georgetown, Caracas, La Habana, San Juan, Miami. Some of these cities, like San Juan and Caracas, enjoy perpetual summer, never a cold day. So I was duped about the Pacific in my youth. I simply can't believe how long it took me to realize it. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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