Outdoor, Yes. Healthy? Maybe Not So Much.

It’s almost impossible to spend more than 15 minutes in Bend without hearing about its “healthy outdoor lifestyle.” Bend’s “healthy outdoor lifestyle” is touted ad nauseam by the locals, as well as the professional booster groups and the local daily newspaper, which seems to run stories about it at least five times a week.

How true is the “healthy outdoor lifestyle” claim? Like most other Bend boasts, this one appears to consist of a small kernel of truth wrapped inside many layers of puffery.

True, Bend is home to an unusual number of world-class athletes, especially endurance athletes – marathoners, triathletes, bicycle racers. They get a lot of attention from the media, and the implication is that their lifestyle and level of physical fitness are representative of the town in general.

But of course elite athletes are a tiny minority anywhere, even in Bend. How outdoorsy is the ordinary Bendite? Is he outdoorsier than most other people? And if he is, does that make him healthier?

Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but The New York Times has posted a cool interactive map that may furnish some clues.

The Gallup polling organization has been calling up 1,000 randomly selected Americans all across the country each day for the past three years and asking them questions about 20 different “well-being indicators,” including everything from how happy they are with their jobs to whether they eat fruit and vegetables. The numbers are broken down in the Times map by congressional districts.

Turns out that people in the 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses all of Eastern Oregon including Bend, actually are pretty outdoorsy – or anyway they get a fair amount of exercise, which isn’t quite the same thing, but close enough. Well over half of them – 56% – said they got at least 30 minutes of exercise on at least three of the previous seven days.

But this is only about average for the western third of the United States, where (according to Gallup) people exercise considerably more than folks on the East Coast or in the Midwest. The four other congressional districts of Oregon have almost exactly the same percentage of exercisers.

Ah, but are people in Eastern Oregon healthier because of all their huffing and puffing and grunting and sweating? Gallup’s numbers suggest they are not.

Asked if they “have health problems that prevent [them] from doing any of the things people [their] age normally do,” 26% of those polled in CD2 answered “yes.” That’s worse than any of the four other districts except CD4 (southwestern Oregon), which had 31%. And it’s worse than Southern California, where the percentages tend to run in the teens and low 20s.

27% of Eastern Oregonians reported they had been told by a physician or nurse that they had high cholesterol – again, more than in any other congressional district except the fourth, and more than in most areas of California. For diabetes and obesity the pattern was similar.

What to make of all this? One obvious point is that being outdoors will not, in itself, make you healthy. Sitting in a fishing boat drinking beer all day or riding around in a golf cart doesn’t do much for your health.

The other thing that jumped out at me while looking at the Times map is that if there’s one thing good health clearly seems to correlate with, it isn’t exercise – it’s money. The more affluent areas of the country (mainly those on the coasts and around large cities) generally scored better on the health questions than the less affluent areas, meaning primarily the inland, rural ones. 

Lack of a good job and economic opportunity – and the likely concomitant, lack of access to necessary health care – may well be more hazardous to your health than couch potato status. So if health is what you're after, instead of moving to Bend for the “healthy outdoor lifestyle” you might be better off moving to LA or San Francisco for a healthy paycheck.

Update: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has just published new rankings that show Deschutes County as the seventh-healthiest of Oregon's 36 counties. We're below the national benchmarks for adult obesity and smoking, but way above the benchmark for "excessive drinking" (18% vs. 8%) and spectacularly above the benchmark for sexually transmitted infections (273 cases of chlamydia per 100,000 population vs. a benchmark of 83 cases).  The data suggest that even more than climbing rocks and riding mountain bikes, folks in Bend like to get drunk and screw.

The Official City Anthem of Bend

This song, which the lovely, talented and saucy Mrs. Jack Elliott e-mailed to me today, says just about everything.

My one bitch: They didn't need to change the lyrics of the chorus. "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right" works perfectly for Bend.

Addendum: I should note that while the song was sent to me by Mrs. Elliott, it was written and performed by a talented local singer named Holly Hamilton.

Prineville: Perhaps Somewhat Less Sucky Than Bend

Today I took a long drive out to Prineville, a pretty little town about 40 minutes northeast of Bend, and up the scenic Crooked River toward Bowman Dam for no particular reason other than to blow the stench of Bend off myself and get the sight of strip malls and clogged highways out of my eyes.

I was glad I did. I was reminded of what we originally moved to Bend for, and what Bend doesn't have anymore: small-town charm, friendly and down-to-earth people, a slower pace of life, affordable homes, wide-open spaces, unobstructed views, no traffic congestion. (Two cars passing each other on Main Street at the same time is almost a traffic jam; see photo above.)

Bend offered all that and more 25 years ago, but thanks to decades of hell-bent-for-leather development it's been uglified and crappified and suckified beyond all recognition -- especially on the Eastside, where I have the misfortune to live.

A quick examination of the climate charts on city-data.com indicates that Prineville also has at least a somewhat milder climate than Bend. For example, the average daily high in Prineville in mid-April is 60 degrees; in Bend it's 55. The average daily high in Prineville in mid-May is around 68; in Bend it's 65. I can't be certain, but the graphs for sunshine and cloud cover seem to show that Prineville gets a little bit more sun too.

This tends to bear out the fact, well-known to locals, that Prineville is the Banana Belt of Central Oregon. Gardeners can grow plants there that wouldn't survive in Bend outside of a greenhouse.

I'm not saying Prineville is paradise. It's even more isolated than Bend, for one thing, and has even fewer entertainment options and cultural amenities. And the political climate is so conservative it makes Bend look like Berkeley.

So I don't think we'll be pulling up stakes for Prineville in the foreseeable future. But it's good to pay the place a visit once in a while just to remember what Bend once had, and stupidly threw away.

Premature Spring Ejaculations

There is a couple who owns a little shop on the Eastside of Bend selling things for gardening and raising chickens and what-not. On the last day of February they put this message up on the sign in front of their shop: “ONLY 20 DAYS UNTIL SPRING.”

I have never met them, but I have heard they are nice people. I bear them no ill will. I wish them success in their business and happiness in their lives.

But if they really believe that spring comes to Bend on March 20, they are idiots.

March 20, of course, is marked as the first day of spring on all the calendars. But all that means is that on March 20 the sun is directly over the equator at noon and days and nights are of equal length. (Thus the name “vernal equinox.”) On June 21, the summer solstice or first day of summer, the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Cancer at noon, giving the northern hemisphere its longest day.

In reality, however, the date of March 20 means absolutely nothing in Bend. It still looks and feels like winter here, and will look and feel like winter until sometime around the middle of June.

Yesterday our local daily newspaper ran its monthly story about the latest measurements of the depth of the snowpack in the Cascades. The snowpack was looking skimpy in mid-February, but a couple of storms blew through in the latter part of the month and now it’s is pretty much back to normal.

The most interesting thing about the story, though, was a little graph that showed snowpack levels through the year, with trend lines for this year, last year, and the historical average from 1971 to 2000.

The historical average line shows that the snowpack reaches its maximum on April 1 and then starts to decline, as fewer and less fierce storms blow in from the Pacific. By July it’s almost all gone.

Based on this, it would make some sense to observe April 1 as the first day of spring in Bend, or at least as the turning point at which winter begins slowly and grudgingly loosening its icy grip on us. But it would make more sense to celebrate June 15 as the real first day of spring, when winter finally relents and warm, sunny weather arrives at last.

On second thought, maybe June 21, which is observed as the first day of summer in parts of the Northern Hemisphere that have a normal climate, should be celebrated as the first day of spring in Bend.

As for when we'd mark the first day of summer ... well, August 1 seems to be the likely candidate.

Bend Slobbery Really Sucks

Have I mentioned that most people in Bend -- the men especially -- are disgusting slobs?

On New Year's Day, my lovely wife and I went out to dinner in a nice restaurant in Bend's Old Mill District. When I say "nice" I'm talking about linen tablecloths and napkins, silverware and entrees starting around $22. Not Le Cirque, but nice.

Most of the guys there, many of whom appeared to be taking their wives or girlfriends out on a date, were wearing the universal male Bend uniform*: jeans (often not too clean), T-shirt with a hoodie (often not too clean either), sneakers and a baseball cap. (The baseball cap, incidentally, is NEVER removed, indoors or out. I think these guys shower with it on.)

A little more than a month later we went to dinner and a jazz performance at The Oxford Suites, which is considered Bend's swankiest hotel. Again, the ubiquitous hoodies, jeans and baseball caps.

Now, I'm not the sort of man you'll see on the cover of GQ or Esquire. I don't insist that guys wear dinner jackets to restaurants. Hell, I don't own a dinner jacket myself. I don't even insist that they wear jackets and ties ... although that sure would be nice.

But for the love of God, people, you don't go out to dinner dressed like you're planning to go fishing or clean out the septic tank. And you most emphatically do not go out to dinner looking like you just DID clean out the septic tank. It is offensive to your fellow diners. At any rate it is offensive to me, and that's what matters.

And one other thing: TAKE OFF THE FUCKING BASEBALL CAP. Thank you very much.

*The Bend female uniform is not much different except for the absence of a baseball cap, sometimes.

Pothole Season Truly and Deeply Sucks

Pothole angling is a favorite summer pastime for the youth of Bend.

The City of Bend does many things badly, and road maintenance is one of the things it hardly does at all.

We're barely into the winter here in Bend, and the local streets and roads are in the worst shape I've ever seen them. Every heavily traveled arterial resembles a shell-pocked World War I battlefield. If you drive over one at any speed in excess of 10 miles per hour, you're probably going to have to make an appointment with your dentist for a couple of new crowns.

Things weren't always this bad. More than 25 years ago, when we first moved here, the streets were kept in pretty good repair. The city even plowed the snow off them -- at least the major ones.

So what went wrong? There's a one-word answer: GROWTH.

Back when Bend was a small town, the city's finances were pretty stable. It took in enough money in property taxes to perform basic municipal services. The potholes were patched, the snow was plowed, the schools stayed open, the water flowed through the water mains and the poop flowed through the sewers.

Then Bend took off in a frenzy of balls-out, hell-for-leather growth, expanding in all directions. Suddenly there were many more miles of streets and water mains and thousands more kids in the classrooms.

SDCs -- Systems Development Charges -- levied on developers are supposed to pay for the new infrastructure that growth requires. But they're set so low that they cover only a fraction of the costs. And they don't pay anything toward the maintenance of the roads, water mains and sewer lines once they're in place -- nor do they contribute anything toward the public school system.

The city got away with it for a few years by running what was essentially a Ponzi scheme, counting on new growth to generate the revenue needed to pay for present growth. But all Ponzi schemes collapse sooner or later, and when the real estate bubble popped, Bend's did.

Add to that the special problems created by Bend's embrace of sprawl -- development spread out over a wide area requires more miles of roads, sewers and water mains than more compact development -- and one can see why the city is now utterly and totally fucked. Municipal services of all kinds are worse in Bend now that it's an "affluent" city of 86,000 than they were in 1985, when it was a poor town of about 26,000.

If you're fortunate enough to live in a place that is NOT Bend and some local politician tries to sell you a line of bullshit about how growth will mean prosperity for your town, bring him to Bend, throw him into one of our potholes and shovel asphalt over him. You'll be doing both yourself and us a favor.

Out With the Old Suck, In With the New Suck

The last month of 2010 turned out to be considerably less sucky than I had anticipated. There actually were a few rather pleasant sunny (though bitterly cold) days scattered through it, including a whole four-day stretch from the 14th through the 17th. And the month ended with two brilliantly sunny, crisp days.

All that, however, could not prevent December from recording more suckiness than sunniness, with a total of 12 days of sun vs. 19 days of suck, for a suck-to-sun ratio of 60:40. Overall, the year had 205 days of sun and 160 days of suck, yielding a sun-to-suck ratio of roughly 56:44.

Which at first glance doesn't look too bad. Like other averages, however, this one can be misleading. The bulk of the sunny days --118 of them -- occurred in the five-month period from June through October. During the whole period of January through May, only 81 sunny days were logged.

June through October were the only months in which sunny days predominated over sucky ones. And the first three-quarters of June and the latter half of October were mainly sucktacular, so the predominantly sunny period was really only about four months long.

What have we learned from this year-long experiment? I believe the data point clearly to two conclusions:

1. The "300 days of sunshine a year" claim is (as originally hypothesized) pure bullshit. It's inflated by almost 50%.

2. If you want to enjoy sunshine, be in Bend between mid-June and mid-October and get the hell out of here for the eight other months of the year.

December Totals:

Days of Sun: 12
Days of Suck: 19

2010 Totals:

Days of Sun: 205
Days of Suck: 160