In perhaps the most famous passage ever written about the Santa Ana winds, Raymond Chandler wrote:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that 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. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
The Santa Ana winds are, indeed, eerie. You hear a low howl and a clattering of branches and leaves across your windows all night long. The weather is hot and dry. And of course, there are the fires. Each fall, it seems as if southern California is burning yet again.
There is a stark contrast between New England and southern California. In Massachusetts, we grow up learning to grit our teeth and bear with the weather. It will snow and ice and it will be impossible to drive and it will feel like it will never end. But everyone knows that it will. And Boston will still be there. There are blizzards and thunderstorms, but the skyline of Boston will not change drastically. Massachusetts just … persists. And New Englanders will keep their stiff upper lip and shovel their driveways.
Los Angeles, on the other hand … there really is always the sense that we are teetering on the edge of the world. We live with the imminent threat of the Big One changing our skyline at any given moment. And there is that mystique surrounding the Santa Anas – it is said that they make people crazy and depressed and act in ways they wouldn’t normally. They sweep fires across the valleys, destroying all in their path. And later comes the rain and Malibu mudslides.
For the most part, the idea that anything can happen is why I love LA. It holds such romance to me, such promise! Anything can happen here! But also … anything can happen.
I caught the sunset over the ocean on Sunday evening, and it really looked like the world was burning. I stared at the orange sky and thought, “This is what the apocalypse will look like.”
I was considering these things and came across this passage by Joan Didion, who put it much more eloquently than I could:
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.
