Bakersfield

Roadside signs advertising fast food, motels, and truck stops clustered together along the freeway exit along with power lines and billboards, like weeds competing for sunlight. It was fitting considering I was looking at Weedpatch Highway, east of Bakersfield, right off the freeway.

I was sitting in a McDonald's, staring out at the hazy horizon at the businesses across the road while I ate a cheeseburger, thinking about how excited I'd get to go to Bakersfield when I was a kid. My family would make the three hour drive from the Owens Valley once a month to visit my grandparents, so I spent many hours of my childhood in the back seat of a Suburban watching the desert floor of sagebrush and Joshua trees turn into rolling hills of golden grasses and sycamores, and then to miles of farm land that looked like a patchwork quilt from above. It was a departure from the norm, so I thought it was fantastic.

After my McDonald's lunch I headed west on Edison Highway. Scrap yards, shuttered buildings, and businesses with spray painted signs lined up on the left, a seemingly endless line of train cars stretched to the right. Downtown is a collection of '20s design and utilitarian brick buildings from the '60s. New suburban developments have taken over where corn and cotton fields had fallowed years ago, nestled against older post-war neighborhoods and oil refineries. Oil wells bob up and down in backyards. New freeways cut through town like asphalt rivers. Palm trees and tumbleweeds sway in the wind.

After spending the day with my aunt and cousins I drove my dad and myself eastbound to home, just like my dad drove my family back in the day. Bear Mountain and Tejon Ranch off the 58 were a welcome sight, but the best view of Bakersfield to most people (including me) is in the rear view mirror. The brown-gray haze faded back into the familiar rolling hills, and the rolling hills sprouted dozens of wind turbines, giant white pinwheels in neat rows standing in contrast to the deep brown of the hillside, as the landscape turned to desert beyond Tehachapi. The sycamores turned to Joshua trees, and they in turn became sagebrush by the time I got home.

Bakersfield isn't a pretty city. It's not the kind of city people dream of moving to, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, but a city you either learn to love, learn to survive, or learn to escape. There are a lot of cities like that in California alone; trying to reinvent itself, expanding for a growing population, full of people making a living or at least surviving, rural roots being taken over by the weeds competing for sunlight. Maybe it's being exposed to the pesticides and petroleum byproducts at an early age, or hearing that song from Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam since I was born, but there's something endearing about the streets of Bakersfield that make me both hold it in some reverence and avoid them like the plague if I can.