When I drove home from Venice last night, I took the Pacific Coast Highway, and thought to myself how calm it was. Surfers sitting on their boards in the water, waiting for a wave. Bikers congregated at Neptune’s Net (and when I say bikers, I don’t mean the Northern California cyclists—I mean guys and girls on Harleys and Hondas and Yamahas). Blue water and blue skies and slow-moving cars with license plates from Colorado and Ohio and Nebraska, with drivers and passengers all staring out their windows to the west.
When I went to bed around midnight, the winds were blowing and the dog was pacing. I awoke to pictures of Malibu burning, and thought of these words, which I read for the first time when I lived in Indiana, and which now, having lived in Southern California for six years, I know to be true:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.
—Joan Didion (from “Los Angeles Notebook,”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times
Labels: California, fires, Joan Didion, Los Angeles, Santa Ana winds, weather, writers
