June 18, 2007
Sacramento’s mythological ventilation
Tags: sacramento, summerOn Friday, after we got the kid to bed, I determined there was enough daylight left to rake and mow the front lawn. As I stood admiring my work in the dying light, I realized something was tickling the back of my neck. It was the pleasant caress of a breeze coming up from a somewhat southerly direction. It was the Delta Breeze and it was wonderful.
Megan writes about how Sacramento’s hot summer nights are upon us, those nights when you want to sit on your porch, stay up late, listen to the tinkle of ice cubes slowly melting in your soda or your lemonade. She calls for a siesta culture, where we nap during the heat of the day to give us an extra burst of energy when it isn’t too hot to be outside:
Summer shifts everything late for me. I eat first dinner when I get home at 6ish and real dinner at nine or ten. The warm nights are tempting me into staying up late and I can’t sleep in in my east facing bedroom, so how do I magically turn us into a siesta culture? I love naps. I want to nap in the shade in a courtyard with a blue-tiled fountain. I want to drowse in a small room with my family making noise in the rest of the house. I want to wake up for these long gentle evenings, light until nine and a late sunset with that crazy star [Venus], and a cold dinner and my city still sitting up talking.
I had to run out this evening on an errand and what did I see? People sitting on their porches. Two girls too young to be cheerleaders practicing cheers in their yards. People who think that Sacramento is a sleepy town that rolls up its sidewalks at 10pm obviously haven’t been here on the evening of a century day.
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The summer nights here are just perfect. We’re so lucky.
June 18, 2007 @ 10:57 pm
There are a lot of night people in Sac, but a very limited palette of activities after 9pm. Transients, drunkies and tweekers are obstacles a late nite stroller must learn to live with, but who wants to stay cooped up?
I love seeing small bands of plain folk bicycling about in the late night city.
June 19, 2007 @ 2:53 am
Malgwyn - I’m willing to live with it. I love bicycling at night during the summer - I don’t do nearly enough of it.
June 19, 2007 @ 7:57 am
People who think the streets roll up at ten haven’t been here, period, or they just don’t go out at ten.
While the options are pretty much limited to drinking, eating, seeing a band, consuming coffee, dancing, or seeing a movie (aside from the traditional “wandering around at random” or “buying smokes”) I figure that’s a pretty good mix of late-night activities.
I like to see roving bands of hipsters (young and old) ambling about late at night, too, and for me the biggest obstacles are the normals out to get drunk and annoying in their new downtown disneyland before drunk-driving back to Elk Grove (I assume that would be the “drunkies” you’re referring to.) Tweekers and transients I can live with.
June 19, 2007 @ 9:43 am
Re: making ours a “siesta culture”, count me in! My favorite day is friday, because I get to spend the whole day with my son, and we get to take a nap in the afternoon. Never mind that the room’s usually broiling because it faces west. Turn the fan on high, point it at us, and drift off to sleep. It’s my favorite part of my favorite day.
June 22, 2007 @ 8:18 pm
while the nightlife out here in the ‘burbs of davis is a bit more atomised than what you describe, i totally know what you’re talking about.
the exquisite feeling of that cool, moist delta breeze on my face, blowing up from the southwest, while i’m sitting in my backyard in the plastic lawn chair digesting a late dinner, watching the crows fly home to roost, or the occasional goose or heron flap by silently, is really incomparable.
i spent a summer up in redding once, and the absence of the delta breeze just suffocated me.
June 28, 2007 @ 10:24 pm
i can remember as a child playing outside until 10pm. i grew up in sacramneto and went to high school in carmichael and can remember at 16 how good a cold beer tasted at 10pm on a hot summer night. I’m now 40, retired from the Marine Corps and living in North Carolina, where it’s too humid to be outside. I can remember being outside all summer.
July 11, 2007 @ 10:23 am