Breathing In Life As It Should Be

I just concluded a road trip that took me to San Diego for three days and then to Colorado Springs for five days. Visiting two places like that can create reentry issues when returning to Bakersfield in August. Sure, the difference in temperature is readily felt, but it’s the dustiness and attendant brownness that are most apparent to me. I’m having trouble shaking the visions of blue skies, white cumulus clouds, and green grasslands, not to mention the mild temperatures and occasionally refreshing summer rain that I thoroughly enjoyed for five days and nights in Colorado Springs. My traveling companion and I immediately noticed that there was a distinct freshness to the air there; it had a sensual quality to it.

My home town has recently been involved in a debate about a proposed city slogan that proudly proclaims that Bakersfield is “Life as it should be.” The public response, to the extent that can be measured by letters to the editor or local blogs, has been decidedly skeptical about adopting that somewhat presumptuous proclamation. Even the most ardent supporters of our city are able to see daylight, albeit dust-laden daylight, between life as it is here and now and “life as it should be”. San Diego and Colorado Springs, while not perfect by any means, are more clearly competitive for such a lofty designation.

I admit that San Diego has several of the downsides of a large metropolitan area and Colorado Springs is not green and mild in the winter when the precipitation often doesn’t qualify as refreshing. These places have their faults and shortcomings and aren’t sterling examples of “life as it should be” in every respect. On any given day, and under certain circumstances, life can be better in Bakersfield, I suppose.

For ages people have believed that all things are comprised of four basic elements – earth, water, heat (fire) and air. Some add the element of space, which is different than air. Others add consciousness, but that takes us down another path. The point being that the quality of the earth, water, heat (temperature) and air are essential to the quality of life. For me, and this is all very subjective, the distinguishing physical characteristic between my city and cities like San Diego and Colorado Springs is the air.

Bakersfield has high quality earth and water. The quality of its heat is subject to personal preference but, again, on any given day it can beat the heat, or lack thereof, being experienced in a lot of other places. The fact that Bakersfield is part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural area in the world, attests to its blend of high quality earth, water and heat.

But, the air is another story. While it’s true that the air in Bakersfield is better than it was 10 or 20 years ago, it’s still, relatively speaking, the worst or second worst in the country in certain respects. Our air conditioning maintenance man, clearly an expert in the field of conditioning the ambient air, recently told us that our city is experiencing significantly more, not less, failures in AC units due to an increased accumulation of particulate matter in those units – i.e., the brown stuff that seems to fill all spaces and cover all things here, at least during this time of the year.

It’s fair for people here to decide that they will settle for having two or three out of the four basic elements in the high-quality column (again, there could be debate about the heat). Clearly, that’s more of “life as it should be” than can be found in the long list of places that have fewer check marks in that column. Still – the air is so omnipresent! Of the four basic elements, it’s the one that is unavoidable; the one that can’t be enriched by adding nutrients (earth) or enhanced by being bottled (water) or mitigated by HVAC systems (heat).

The air is what it is, for better or for worse. We have two basic choices: breathe it or leave it. Actually, there are two other choices regarding the air: you can choose to live where you can see it or to live where you can’t see it. You can see it as you breathe it in Bakersfield; you can’t see it in Colorado Springs. If you want to consume dirt in Colorado Springs you have to bend down and grab a handful of it and shove it in your mouth. In five days there I never saw anyone do that. In Bakersfield, you just need to take breaths. In 19 years here I’ve seen everyone in this city do this every minute of every day.

The point of this babble is obvious – air matters a great deal when it comes to the quality of life and we should pay close attention to what we suck into our lungs 15,000 – 20,000 times a day. If what we breathe isn’t good for us for any reason, then we should do something about it and that effort should be consistent and aggressive. If we’re gong to make such a hullabaloo about second-hand smoke from cigarettes, then we should be equally focused on toxic smoke from all other sources. There should be no exceptions – every person, every business, every industry, and every community must do all that it can do to improve the quality of the air. We owe that to ourselves, but we especially owe that to our children because they breathe what they do and where they do because of our choices, not theirs.

When it rains in Bakersfield or when a wind blows and the bad air is suddenly and almost magically removed from our valley for a few days or even for a few hours, then we’re given a pleasant glimpse of “life as it should be”. On those days, this is a beautiful place to live, with mountains framing our view on three sides. On those days, we’re fond of observing how “close the mountains are today.” On those days, someone could visit here and then return home to Colorado Springs and tell their neighbors, “The folks in Bakersfield have a great slogan, “Life as it should be.”