James Del, LTD

Aug. '09

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.

The city burning is Los Angeles’ 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.

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I’ve tried to read everything I can about the fires currently raging in Southern California, as the area’s palpable sense of pending doom has long been a morbid fascination of mine. Invariably, when such things take place, as they often tend to do, I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Ana” from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, from which I pulled the excerpts above.

And if you haven’t seen Eric Spiegelman’s cool videos of the fires raging on the horizon from his balcony, one during the day and the other at night, they’re a must see.

(via cajunboy)