A typical empty lot in the Fresno/Clovis conurbation. With a population of more than half a million and growing, views like this are growing less common in the area.

They are relics of the township and range system of land allotment which was devised to share out in a fair way the vast new territories acquired by the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, and which is the basis for the familiar grid system on which most American towns west of the Mississippi are laid out. In this they differ fundamentally from undeveloped lots in European towns, which – as densely overgrown as they may appear – almost certainly have a history of intense human activity going back many centuries. Hard as it is to fathom, these wild acres are pretty much as they were when the first white settlers crossed the mountains to try their fortunes in the promised land towards the setting sun.

Standing on such a parcel of land here in the San Joaquin Valley of central California – especially one undisturbed by the plough – one imagines wistfully the world that the naturalist John Muir encountered when he journeyed from San Francisco to Yosemite in the summer of 1868. He wrote:

…The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains. Florida is indeed a land of flowers, but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between, as in our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers; not, as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, but free and separate, one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between.

Little of Muir’s San Joaquin remains. It was quickly noted that a land which could support flora in such abundance must be fertile indeed, and today the valley is an immense patchwork of fields, providing much of America’s fruit, vegetables, nuts, wine, dairy produce and cotton and all of its raisins. So it has remained for most of the last 150 years, interspersed here and there with small towns and just the occasional larger city – Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield. For while it is an ideal place for agriculture, it is less attractive for human habitation. The San Joaquin’s climate is classified as savanna: dry, flat grassland, with stagnant air that cradles cloying fogs in the winter and extreme, stifling heat in the summer. It rains seldom, so that the air also easily traps haze and pollution, rendering the beautiful, snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains and the lower Coast Range invisible for much of the year and giving the valley an illusory resemblance to the endless featurelessness of the midwestern prairies.

Even with modern air conditioning, it is a harsh place to live. For the early farmers, toiling in layers of Victorian clothes, it must have been almost unbearable. The few older farmhouses that remain are often built on stilts to allow air to circulate underneath and provide some coolness. At four o’clock in July and August – the hottest part of the day – valley cities can seem like ghost towns. Nothing stirs on the burning sidewalks – or anywhere else except in the fields, where migrant workers from Mexico and Central America pick fruit and cotton no matter how high the mercury rises. Even driving is difficult: if you have not found some shade, your parked car will be like an oven, the seats scalding hot, the steering wheel and gearshift intolerable to touch. Opening windows does nothing to cool either buildings or vehicles: you just crank up the AC and hope it works quickly.

A semi-rural scene in Clovis, California in December 2003.

Yet ever-growing numbers of people call this unforgiving environment home. The transformation of the San Joaquin began in the 1930s, with the arrival of thousands of poor farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl disaster of the Midwest, seeking a still-fertile place where they could begin anew. Now the valley is seeing a fresh influx of humanity: but these new invaders are fleeing not an environmental disaster but a more modern and prosaic phenomenon. California’s tourist image of golden beaches, sun, palm trees and the emblematic grandeur of the Golden Gate have driven property prices and the cost of living off the scale in the state’s main population centres around San Francisco Bay, the Los Angeles basin and San Diego.

The same location five years later - now a small business park.

Suddenly the baked San Joaquin Valley, with its high unemployment, inhospitable climate and abundant land leading to relatively low property prices, is looking attractive. People from the megalopolises are selling their million-dollar townhouses and buying big new homes in the valley. Some continue to commute to their jobs in the city, but with the people comes infrastructure and the businesses seeking to serve and employ them. The new housing developments are no longer dormitories but are beginning to house new valley dwellers.

All of this needs space, and with the fields of the San Joaquin still growing much of the nation’s food that space must be reclaimed from those empty lots within the city limits. The view shrinks, the old trees fall, the wildflowers and ground squirrels that lived there must make way for the humans who would now live and work on the land that was their home. Piece by piece,as we watch, the last parcels of John Muir’s wilderness are vanishing under the concrete foundations of the future.

Fresno State Bulldogs win College World Series

The Bulldogs’ amazing run to the title – winning their local league, then regional and super-regional championships, brushing aside the challenges of national powerhouse schools Arizona State, Rice and North Carolina before defeating 8th-ranked Georgia in the championship series – has rightly been called a Cinderella story. The team from a modest university in rural California was rated 89th in the country going into the tournament, and ended up as the lowest-ranked school ever to win a national college championship in any sport.

Fresno State Bulldogs welcome home

To put their achievement into perspective, it is as if the current world number 89 tennis player, Galina Voskoboeva (yes, that’s right… who?) were to win the women’s singles at Wimbledon, or as if Notts County – the team that finished 89th in English senior football last season – were to lift the FA Cup. As implausible as both those scenarios seem, they go some way to explaining why jaws have been dropping across America and why Fresno is suddenly on the map for more than bad air and being the birthplace of Sam Peckinpah.

The popularity of college sports in the United States is hard for outsiders to fathom. In Britain, the only college sporting event that gets any national attention is, bizarrely, the University Boat Race – in a sport which otherwise inspires total apathy among the general public except when the likes of Redgrave and Pinsent are performing their Olympic heroics. The only reason the Boat Race is watched at all is probably because it takes place on the Thames: back when the river was London’s main artery of commerce, the race would have brought the entire city grinding temporarily to a halt so that there was nothing else to do but watch it.

British universities do play other organised sports, of course, but they tend to be strictly low-key affairs. Stop a passer-by in the streets of Loughborough, for example, and ask him how his local university’s rugby team is doing, and he will probably give you a blank stare. A game between the Uniteds of Oxford and Cambridge, even though both teams are now languishing in the Conference – the fifth tier of English football – will draw a much bigger crowd than a match between their university counterparts.

College teams have occasionally had some measure of success competing against the professionals rather than each other: Oxford University reached the FA Cup Final a couple of times in the 1880s, and more recently an outfit named Team Bath – comprised of students from the university in that city – has actually outstripped the achievements of the local professional club.

But those are rare exceptions. Professional sports in Europe do not look to universities to recruit, preferring to nurture young talent under the auspices of their own youth development programs. The situation in the United States is radically different. Surprisingly perhaps for such a materialistic culture, the concept of professional sports took a long time to catch on. Sport was seen as a gentlemanly pursuit, and prior to the Second World War, although there were professional leagues, being paid to play was regarded as sleazy, if not downright dishonorable. For most ‘athletes’ (as they are generically called here) who wanted to play at the highest level, college therefore offered the best opportunities.

As they tended to be the largest organisations in their communities, the universities were beacons not only of academia but also of athletics, and often became the focus of a city’s identity. In the absence of any press attention for the despised professionals, people followed the fortunes of their collegiate teams and identified closely with them. Fans were as passionate as any Manchester United or Real Madrid supporter. Some colleges became world-famous in large part because of their athletics programs: Notre Dame’s football team – ‘The Fighting Irish’ – is perhaps the best-known example. Even in today’s world of the multi-billion dollar NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and other sporting circuses this tradition has endured – particularly with football and basketball, which professionalised much later than baseball and ice hockey and are followed as keenly as the pros, often even drawing larger TV audiences for the big end-of-season matches.

The relationship between a community and its college athletes is especially intense in towns like Fresno, which does not have a major league team. Home football games at Bulldog Stadium regularly draw capacity crowds of 45,000 – one-tenth of the city’s population. The university’s new 15,000-seat indoor arena, the Save Mart Center, is always packed for both men’s and women’s basketball. And although baseball receives somewhat less attention – especially now that Fresno has a minor league professional club with a brand new stadium downtown – the excitement and anticipation that rippled through the town as the ‘Diamond Dogs’ disposed of opponent after superior opponent was palpable. What had been unthinkable only a few weeks ago suddenly seemed like more than a dream.

Still, the town braced itself for disappointment. Fresno State’s first and only national championship in any sport had been ten years before, in women’s softball. That team had gone on to make up the bulk of the American gold medal-winning squad at the Sydney Olympics. Since then, nothing. The football and basketball teams often promised much but failed to deliver, beset by scandals involving cheating, unethical coaching practices, sexual harassment and payment for playing (college sports are still strictly amateur). The baseball program had avoided being tainted by most of this but even so, the team was so lowly-ranked that they surely could not go on causing upsets.

But they could.

As thousands of well-wishers lined the streets around the university and filed into the baseball stadium the next day to welcome them home, the reality and magnitude of the Bulldogs’ achievement was still sinking in – for the players as well as the townsfolk. Though they clearly enjoyed soaking up the adulation as they rolled slowly past the cheering masses of red-shirted fans atop two borrowed city fire trucks, they also seemed genuinely touched by their reception, not to mention a little bewildered. Some of the players had already been drafted by major league clubs before the team’s victory, and several more now most assuredly will be offered pro contracts. Only a very small number of them will go on to a successful career in baseball, but for all 25 members of the squad, life will never be the same.

In one sense these are regular college men, showing up to classes and sitting in rows just like any other student. The majority of them are not due to complete their degrees for a year or more. But their phones are undoubtedly ringing off the hook already, and for some the pressure to forego the rest of their education and sign a pro contract will be relentless. Already they are household names.

For an outsider – even a semi-outsider like me – it’s hard to grasp. I know which boat crossed the finish line at Chiswick Bridge first this spring, but I could not name a single member of the victorious Oxford eight or their cox – and neither, I suspect, could 99% of people. Matthew Pinsent rowed in the event three times, but it was his Olympic exploits which brought him fame. For the general public, the Boat Race is a straight shootout: the only thing of importance is which crew won. But a tickertape parade through the streets of Oxford? Probably not.

It doesn’t take much to feel the lift this national championship has wrought over the town. Fresno is something of a national joke – a kind of Californian Croydon – struggling as it does with its remote and ugly location, high unemployment, poverty and rampant pollution. Everywhere you go you see the university’s red and blue colors in store windows, in front yards and on the local buses. People have been queueing around the block outside the Bulldog Shop to buy commemorative T-shirts, flags, bumper stickers and other merchandise. Young people are going online to say that the College World Series triumph has made them proud for the first time to be a Fresno State student. A city starved of success – sporting or otherwise – can finally say it is the best in something. And at least for a short time, until the fall and yet another football season of promise and disappointment brings us back to reality, perhaps that will prove to be an even greater achievement for Steve Detwiler and his teammates than any victory on the baseball diamond.

The reasons we have this not entirely accurate notion are many, but include the influence of American film and television, particularly shows like Law and Order and CSI, in which women (and men) meet nocturnal doom with such frequency it’s a wonder any of them emerge into the morning light to cultivate the next generation.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how I was taken aback by what happened to me one evening shortly after my arrival in the United States seven years ago. It was dusk – the last sunlight was gone but it was still just light enough to see – and I was walking along a quiet road which cuts through the university farm near where we live; following it from our apartment to meet my wife as she got off work. It was as pleasant a walk as a city built on the grid system on an utterly flat alluvial plain can offer: a three-mile trek past fields and silos and agricultural aromas reminding me of home, with the sky deepening to gas-flame blue and the first stars coming out.

A car passed me going in the opposite direction, slowed, u-turned and pulled up alongside me. The driver, a woman, asked if I wanted a lift somewhere. I looked at her rather oddly for a moment, more in surprise that she seemed oblivious to the possibility of my having a concealed butcher knife about my person than anything else. My resemblance to Freddy Kruger is passing at best, but in the available light we might as well, from her point of view, have shared a womb. So, in what I judged to be the woman’s own best interests, I declined. Besides, I was liking the walk and don’t much enjoy conversing with strangers.

After she’d driven off, it occurred to me that the reason she’d stopped was that she was surprised as well – enough to override any fear she might have had of ending up in several pieces in a shallow grave somewhere. Scratch that – she was so surprised that she’d not only stopped, she’d actually turned around and been prepared to take me in the opposite direction to the one in which she was traveling. And the reason for her surprise was that I was walking.

Fresno - not a walker's paradise...

The United States does have its ‘walking’ cities: places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco where for a variety of reasons it’s impractical to drive, or in many cases even to own a car. These cities all have excellent and comprehensive transit systems which make it easy to ride between any two points; and where the bus, the subway or the trolley don’t go, it’s an easy matter to cover the remaining distance on foot.

But by and large, walking just isn’t something you do in America. The country isn’t designed with pedestrians in mind. Fresno, California is typical of many newer American cities: it’s sprawling. A population of 500,000 is stretched across an area more than half the size of Greater London. The city blocks are half a mile on each side, bounded by main thoroughfares which are four to six lanes wide. To cross these without falling foul of the jaywalking laws, you must use a crosswalk, usually controlled by a light which remains green for pedestrians for about five seconds at a time. Getting all the way across in one shot requires, at the very least, a gait something like an Olympic race walker’s. Away from the main roads and into the neighbourhoods, you’re lucky if the streets even have sidewalks. There are so few opportunities for pavement-pounding that it’s a wonder the shoe industry in the US isn’t in perpetual crisis.

The distances pose many practical problems. The ‘local’ store might be a mile or two away. There’s no public transport except for a handful of taxis and the lumbering and thinly-spread bus network, which on a good day can take an hour to get you from the outskirts to downtown. Walking gets you nowhere fast. The wide main streets and the four freeways do. You need a car.

But I’d just arrived from England, where I’d been used to walking a mile and a half to and from work every day. I didn’t have a driver’s licence yet and was already starting to see the effects of American cuisine on my midriff. I was still enough of a new immigrant to see the absurdity in driving three miles to the gym in order to walk for three miles on a treadmill. Nevertheless, I needed to get some exercise, and three miles was no distance at all to me.

Fast forward seven years. The nearest supermarket is indeed more than a mile away. It’s a trip I now wouldn’t dream of making on foot – over a distance which, when I was younger, I would walk once a week, uphill, carrying four heavy bags of groceries from the bus stop to our house. Of course, food is cheaper here and I can afford to buy more of it, but that’s hardly the point.

Another consideration is the scenery. Walking is all very well in San Francisco or New York, where there’s always plenty to see and do on the way and you can always jump on a bus which is actually going where you want to go if you get tired. But in a city like Fresno, trudging over flat ground for block after identikit block, towards traffic lights marking intersections which never seem to get closer, gets old pretty quickly. There’s also the fact that this is the second most polluted county in the entire country, not to mention triple-digit summer temperatures, to take into consideration. Jumping into the car to go even a short distance doesn’t, for the most part, take a second thought.

People do walk – those who can’t afford to run a car or even take the bus. I’ve not yet reached the point where the sight of someone strolling down the side of the road would have me slamming on my brakes, flinging open my passenger door and inviting them to take a load off. In fact, with the price of gasoline careening off the scale, things look as if they might come full circle. Instead of driving to the store, I might slip a backpack on and ride my bike – or, good heavens, even walk. If I do, I doubt I’ll be recklessly offered any more lifts. Especially not by someone going the opposite way. They wouldn’t be able to afford it.

The veteran striker pounced after Cardiff goalkeeper Peter Enckelman could only flap at a John Utaka cross.

The two unlikely finalists contested a spirited if unspectacular game in front of a sell-out crowd for the second Final at the new Wembley. With Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool having all fallen by the wayside by the sixth-round stage, many have seen this season’s competition as the ‘everyfan’ Cup – a chance for some of the less powerful clubs to shine. So dominant have the Premier League’s ruling elite become that the FA Cup is seen as one of the few opportunities for other clubs to win some silverware; even so, this was to be only the third time in the last 20 years that a team other than one of the Big Four would be taking home the famous old trophy.

Cardiff, bidding to become the first winners from outside the top flight since West Ham in 1980, started looking the more purposeful and Pompey keeper David James was called into action early on to deny Paul Parry. But although they enjoyed plenty of possession, they rarely posed a serious threat and the Portsmouth back line, bossed by captain Sol Campbell and England international Glen Johnson, comfortably absorbed most of the pressure.

Harry Redknapp’s side soon began to stamp their authority on the game and spotted opportunities to test Enckelman, who looked uncomfortable in the slippery conditions and did not make a single held save in the entire game, preferring to punch or parry whatever came his way. Still they failed to create a serious chance until the 21st minute, when Kanu inexplicably pushed his shot against the post after comfortably rounding the keeper.

Sixteen minutes later he made up for his blunder when Utaka’s cross wrong-footed Enckelman, who could only palm the ball out to the waiting Nigerian, and Kanu made no mistake this time with a simple tap-in.

Cardiff almost came up with an immediate response when Parry’s cross picked out Kevin McNaughton at the right post but the Scot, at full stretch, sliced well wide. The Welsh side did get the ball in the net just before the interval, but Glen Loovens was correctly adjudged to have controlled it with his arm before sending his lobbed shot over James.

Pompey made their superior strength and fitness tell in the second half, a series of bruising physical challenges in midfield breaking up numerous Cardiff attacks and forcing referee Mike Dean to show several yellow cards. For all their possession, the Bluebirds seemed out of ideas and it was no surprise when Dave Jones withdrew the tiring Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink – appearing in possibly his last game for the club – and Peter Whittingham, replacing them with Steve Thompson and 17-year-old Aaron Ramsey. The two substitutes succeeded in making the Portsmouth defence work harder but an equaliser looked as far off as ever.

And Cardiff might have fallen further behind when Sylvain Distin embarked on a mazy run which was only stopped by a well-timed tackle from Roger Johnson.

But in the end, a single goal was enough and Sol Campbell led his team’s victorious climb to the Royal Box to collect the Cup from Sir Bobby Robson. Portsmouth held the trophy for seven years the last time they won it, when the competition was suspended during the Second World War. They, and many others, will savour this triumph for at least as long, both as a glorious day for Portsmouth Football Club and a rare moment in the sun for one of English football’s second string.

It’s sunny and warm now, and aside from a likely few showers over the next month or so, it won’t rain again until after the county fair in late October.

The reason I can be so assured in this prediction is that I live in one of the world’s most stable climate zones: a Scotland-sized expanse of flat, featureless farmland, stretching from Sacramento and the San Joaquin Delta in the north to Bakersfield and the Kern County mountains in the south, sandwiched between the 14,000-foot Sierra Nevada massif and the lower, but no less imposing, Coast Range. Air masses blowing in through San Francisco Bay and the Delta hit a dead end in this vast basin, trapped by an inversion layer which exerts a death grip on any weather it brings with it. And as the summer goes on, the mountains suck away all moisture and the dry air beneath gets hotter and hotter. Any rain that does fall evaporates long before it reaches the valley floor.

The San Joaquin Valley, California

San Joaquin Valley, one of the most fertile places on Earth

Valley people don’t invest much in the weather. Unless you like to ski or snowboard at one of the nearby mountain resorts, you can get by quite nicely with a wardrobe of spring and summer clothing and a light jacket or two. Go out on even the frostiest January day and you’ll encounter at least one youth walking around quite happily in shorts and flip-flops. Even sunscreen isn’t a major priority, because on those hot July afternoons, if you have any sense, you don’t go outside – you stay someplace where there’s air conditioning.

Being a meteorologist here is a thankless job, especially during the long dry summer. The local TV stations go to extraordinary lengths to try to make the weather interesting, plugging technological toys that claim to be able to home in on the most tenuous of rain showers and plot their paths down to which streets will get wet and which will stay dry. Great significance is extracted from a two- or three-degree fluctuation in temperature, as well as constant comparisons with the record high and low for that date. Local forecasts are padded by wistful looks at distant corners of the country, where things might perhaps be more atmospherically lively.

The climate here may be stable, but it can be, ironically, just as deadly as anywhere else. In winter, local newspapers in Britain run stories about elderly people in danger of hypothermia because they can’t afford to heat their homes. Here, the stories appear in high summer and the OAPs are in danger of heatstroke because they can’t afford to run their air conditioning. Flooding is a worry, too, because it rains so little that the city’s drainage system can’t cope adequately with a sudden downpour or a more prolonged spell of wet weather. Tornadoes are about as common as they are in Britain, but they’re paid much keener attention to here because once they start, there’s very little geography available which might help to slow them down.

Hailing as I do from perennially cool and damp London, it took a while to get used to the effect of weather here, like the way a light shower is referred to as a ‘storm’, or the way the power goes out and traffic grinds to a halt with the first rain of autumn. Old-timers still get mileage from the winter long ago when snow actually reached the valley floor and settled for an hour. In July and August, at the other end of the graph where daytime temperatures can climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for weeks on end, it’s amusing to listen to the news anchors looking forward to a ‘balmy’ 95 degrees the next day.

It’s a two-way street, of course. Those examples are no less ridiculous on their face than the way Londoners flounder in half an inch of snow and call it a blizzard. And American expat Bill Bryson, in his book The Mother Tongue, recalls his hilarity when the London Evening Standard once ran the headline ‘Britain Sizzles in the 70s’.

We humans are adaptable, and we can get used to pretty much any alien climate. On my first visit to California, I recall a trip to the coast on Boxing Day and how incongruous it seemed to be walking around comfortably in a T-shirt and sunglasses, through streets bedecked with festive lights and past stores piping out Christmas carols. Now, I don’t bat an eyelid if it’s 70 degrees at Christmas. And I can assure you that after weeks of enduring triple-digit summer temperatures, wading through air like hot porridge and risking third-degree burns from touching your car’s steering wheel, a 95-degree day really is balmy.