Joan Didion and the Santa Ana Winds

Los Angeles is perpetually on fire

There are fires all over Los Angeles. The Eaton Fire burning near Pasadena, where hospital patients were evacuated. The Palisades Fire forcing relocation on 30,000 residents as far as Montana Avenue. Seems feminine names are reserved for hurricanes, fires just get names based on their location. Either way, the names are necessary. There are too many, they must be differentiated.

The Santa Ana winds are at fault for the ever-present sirens filling up Los Angeles today. Every time it’s windy in Los Angeles, I wonder if it’s the Santa Anas, and when it actually is, I think about the Joan Didion essay from Slouching Toward Bethlehem: “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.”

Do people who don’t reside in Los Angeles know what the Santa Ana winds are? As a Southern California native, they are to me like mythical beasts, like El Niños: phenomena that wreak havoc on Los Angeles, then disappear. In reality, the Santa Anas are the hot winds that pass through the Santa Ana Canyon. They bring fire.

I know fires because I know drought. When I was up at Berkeley, the fires raged so relentlessly that the sun was blocked out for days. N95s were passed out on campus, but the air was too toxic to walk to campus to get them—ten minutes outside was like smoking two packs of cigarettes, I think they said. In the morning, everything—the sky, the trees, the horizon—was the color of a bad spray tan. I have this weird cloudy dot near my left iris—some tissue grew where it wasn’t supposed to, as a result of my sensitive eyes in that air quality. Now I’m supposed to use eye drops every day.

When my transplant friends started discussing the fires yesterday morning, I thought they were being so cute. They sent videos of the flames—they could see them from their office windows and their apartment balconies. They kept me updated on the percentage of containment. I marveled at their nervousness, like New Yorkers during that random earthquake this spring. I felt they had a sense of awe I never experienced, growing up where there were always fires.

Then I saw that evacuation was spreading even quicker than the fire. My friends packed go bags. I told them they can stay at mine if they didn’t have somewhere to go—I live near West Hollywood, which is currently a peninsula in a sea of evacuation orders. I feel stupid for thinking my friends were being cute. But as Joan Didion wrote, “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”

The winds have been blowing since yesterday. When I walked to CVS in the afternoon, I got caught in a leaf tornado. Sirens wailed on Wilshire, but no one was out walking. I wore my glasses to protect my eyes from flying objects, but something still got past them and I walked the rest of the way home with my left eye closed.

Unrelatedly, the lights are out in half of my apartment. They stopped working last Friday and the electricians are delayed because they’re helping family evacuate. I’m using a lamp light, a reading light, and a candle, and though this semi-blackout has nothing to do with what’s going on outside, it’s adding to the atmosphere. The Santa Anas make it feel more like Halloween than Halloween.

Even when not spreading fire—which they always do—the Santa Ana winds carry with them unsettlement. It’s scientific. From Didion: “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… What an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.” Apparently, the Santa Ana winds bring a rise in headaches, nausea, allergies, nervousness, depression. When Switzerland gets this kind of wind, suicide rates go up. I’ve been telling people for years that crime rates increase during Santa Anas, but now I’m not sure where I got that fact.

The winds this time are particularly bad, the strongest Southern California has experienced in more than a decade. The city of Los Angeles is under a state of emergency. Bruce Silverstein, a Malibu City Council member, said, “The Palisades Fire is a monster. It is burning out of control, and the Santa Ana winds are spreading the fire and embers very fast.” The LAFD has asked for all off-duty staff to make themselves available, the first time it has done so in 19 years.

If you don’t know the geography of Los Angeles, I don’t blame you. But here’s what’s important today: the Palisades Fire is on the west side, bordering the ocean. Altadena—where the second fire rages—is on the east side, on the other end of Los Angeles. Between them are Pasadena, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills. I’m not scared that they’re going to spread so bad they kiss on Melrose Avenue, but Los Angeles is facing a two-front attack, and the winds aren’t predicted to stop until this evening.

I looked up the increase in crime during Santa Anas fact, and I was right.

In “Los Angeles Notebook,” Joan Didion wrote, “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.” It’s been about fifteen minutes since I last heard a siren. I wonder where they all went.

Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire Evacuation Shelters:

Westwood Recreation Center
1350 Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025

El Camino Real Charter High School
5440 Valley Circle Blvd, Woodland Hills, CA 91367

Pasadena Civic Center
300 East Green Street, Pasadena, CA 91101