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PAGE UPDATED 8.2.10
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 sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to 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.
"On nights
like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana,
"every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives
feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.
Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it
was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the
effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of
those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The
Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through,
is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the
hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent
winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France
and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics:
it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although
the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the
mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever
and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea
and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression."
In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal
classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.
In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and
in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating
circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind,
because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few
years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during
such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them,
the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative
ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some
talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances.
In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of
positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.
One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.
Easterners commonly
complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern
California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly,
numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact
the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes:
two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for
weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward
the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana,
which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.
At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies
men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests,
and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting
routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did
in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.
In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa
Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.
Just to watch the
front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get
very close to what it is about the place. The longest single
Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not
the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November
21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the
San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles
an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane
force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people
ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects.
On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control.
On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents,
and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a
box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent
Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his
wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South
Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from
a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still
out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles
an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently,
and on the third the wind began to break.
It is hard for people
who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the
Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning
is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West
perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the
1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were
the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and
see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be
in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe,
of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters
of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence
and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality
of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.
The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
Excerpt from Slouching
towards Bethlehem, © by Joan Didion.