The Devil Winds

The story of California’s golden land begins with the country.

Los Angeles, whose weather is both known for its beauty and caviled by Easterners as being bland and unvarying, is prone to interruptions of a seductive calm that can become quite violent. LA is in certain ways an alien place; it is not the coastal California of subtropical twilight and the soft Westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California haunted by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that whines through at 100 miles an hour and works the nerves. October, at the end of the month just before Halloween, is a bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult, and the hills blaze up spontaneously.

To study these winds is to gaze over a long history in which a natural force of the most underappreciated element comes in from the desert and topples enormous trees, fans flames in the canyons and ignites infernos in the forests. These winds have inspired literature and fascinated Californians for their destructive nature in the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years.

“The climate here 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.”

I would imagine that it is difficult for those outside of southern California to understand how vividly the Santa Ana captures local lore and how much a part of life its unpredictability is. The image of LA burning is engrained in the mind. What strikes the imagination is a picture of the city burning, burning, burning.

“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 unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” 


Additional Sources:

http://sharepoint.mvla.net/teachers/HectorP/Language%20and%20Comp%20AP/Documents/Resource%20AP%20Prompts/Joan%20Didion,%20Santa%20Ana%20Winds%20(samples).pdf
http://voices.yahoo.com/on-diction-selection-detail-joan-didions-795841.html
http://tywls12ela.wikispaces.com/file/view/Didion+Los+Angeles+Notebook.pdf
http://www.carljay.com/whatsnew/nothing_left.htm