Smogscapes

HEADING DOWN to Anaheim, or, as some call it, Anacrime & Punishment, this weekend. It's Crim's hometown, but it might as well be mine, since my family moved away from Riverside, or, as some call it, Rivercide.

Riverside is an ill-conceived SoCal suburb in the desert. Anaheim is an ill-conceived SoCal suburb by the coast. I still prefer my desert version, on the principle that one's own shit never smells quite so foul.

It's funny to miss smog-choked skies and 110-degree afternoons, but I do. I miss making the death march for a snow cone, and fleeing baked parking lots for refrigerated buildings.

The forecast for Anaheim is in the 90s, so maybe if I squint...and find some bad air to inhale...


If you hanker for more Inland Empire nostalgia, try this piece I wrote for the local paper a while back:


In defense of the 909
January 12, 2003
By EMMA POLLIN SPECIAL TO THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

I moved to Riverside from New York City at the tender age of 3 and grew up under smog and sunshine before leaving for college in Berkeley. Now I'm in New York again, but home to me will always mean brown mountains and the desert heat that I describe to friends here as a nice dry bake.

Moving so far away has taught me one thing: people love to bash the Inland Empire.

As a high school senior, I remember flipping through a college guidebook to find a description of UC Riverside. Quality school, it read, hands-on professors, nice campus-and then the caveat -- "The city is boring."

I have to admit, there is something gratifying in finding out that the place where you grew up is, officially, boring. Perhaps it's the same kind of pride people draw on if they grew up in Siberia --the clout of having survived something. But now that I'm a little wiser, I don't think I deserve that clout. Rumor to the contrary, the Inland Empire isn't all that bad.

When I tell people I'm from Riverside, I get this look of pity, as if I've just confessed that I grew up in an orphanage. I always ask what they think is so bad, expecting a diatribe about smog and strip malls. But the answers are unpredictable, and I'm amazed by both the uniformly negative reactions and the wildly different justifications for them.

We're all familiar with the region's well-deserved reputation for nasty summers, but I also hear some left-fielders, like "Do you guys have hog-tying contests at, like, the county fair?" Many describe Riverside as "ghetto," which arouses more of that perverse pride, but, of course, isn't really accurate.
The fact that people disparage the Inland Empire in contradictory ways is a clue that they have seen little more than the view from the 91 freeway. (Which is, in all fairness, occasionally scenic.)

Since I left, the "armpit of Southern California" jibes have seemed increasingly out of hand. I hoped I was imagining this trend, but an old North High chum confirmed my suspicions. He explained that the dubiously dubbed "world famous" radio station KROQ had been insulting the I.E. on the air, promoting a "Valley of the Dirt People" image -- a mullet on every head and a meth lab in every kitchen. Then last spring, KROQ's DJs offered a now-infamous apology. They announced an Inland Invasion concert to which all "909ers" would be admitted free. The concert was a hoax. On April Fool's Day, hundreds of humiliated Inland youths, many in "909 PRIDE" t-shirts, showed up for a concert that was never to be.

That two LA DJs should pull such a prank is typical. The worst offenders of the Inland Empire are, inexplicably, our neighbors to the north and west. Now, I can understand people from Paris or San Francisco turning up their noses, but someone from Santa Ana or Oxnard? What makes them so superior?

In most respects, our area is like the entire Southland: too many freeways, ample sunshine, and not enough human interaction. And if the ways that it's bad are typical, most of the ways that it's different are, in my opinion, good.

We have open spaces and a stunning desert landscape. You can buy a house on the cheap and raise your children in a diverse community. As the nation's economy crumbles, the I.E. is one of the few regions sustaining growth. Riverside even has a downtown, which is an awful lot to ask in sprawling Southern California. I won't sugar-coat smog, but how is it that heat makes the I.E. undesirable while Palm Springs is a vacation mecca? In New York's January, I'm craving nothing more than a good dry bake.

Thanks to my Anaheim-reared boyfriend, I have seen more than enough of superior-acting Orange County. Sure, I envy their nearby beaches and eternal 72-degree weather, but I get nauseated by the uniformly paved suburbs that blur together and the endless plains of cookie-cutter houses where lawns pass for nature. I never know if I'm in Anaheim or Tustin or Garden Grove, and I long for some mountains to break things up. Give me the 909 over that.

The Inland Empire isn't just pavement and immaculately planted road dividers. There's raw nature -- hawks, coyotes, and yes, plenty of dirt -- and maybe that is jarring to Californians who like their landscapes tamed. They don't know what to call it, so they call it the boondocks. But beneath all the lawns and pavement, this is what Southern California really is: a big desert wearing a grass mask. And at the end of every gray-skied day, there is a beautiful smogset.