When Joan Didion wrote, “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are,” she made observations in the analytical, philosophical, eye-opening way Didion had a penchant for.
And when I read it first, where and when I can’t remember, though I think there was a classroom with glossy wood desks and brick walls, I decided, unequivocally, she was right.
Many writers have found themselves sitting in Southern California on a day the wind starts and are struck by it, the sneaking understanding that the wind is blowing and something is amiss.
Raymond Chandler wrote the wind can “…make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Dean Koontz wrote, “…even the spiders were agitated by it.” Didion illustrated the violence and fire of Los Angeles and the wind that brings it about.
It is no secret — the Santa Ana winds and the upset they bring. But here is, as they would say, me taking a whack at it.
It is November, only four days before Thanksgiving, and the Santa Ana winds have started to blow. Per usual, there is no warning, only the weather people and the weather apps playing catch up, broadcasting high winds as if they’d known all along and had forgotten to share the secret.
The sky is clear blue, as it always is in San Diego, even when it plans to rain later, even when it sneaks in hail. When the winds blow, they blow invisible and are only obvious because of the air on skin, the rumbling of trees and drapes, and the unsettling of San Diegans all around.
The awning in the front of the house creaks and groans as the wind picks up, the years-old arms and fabric taking a beating. White curtains in the bedroom suck in and out to match the breath of the day.
Five great palm trees bordering the neighbor’s yard sway from side to side, the leaves slapping together so loud it mimics waves crashing on the beach in Torrey Pines or Solana.
Neighbors take bets and wonder if this will be the Santa Ana that finally brings the five palm trees down. They always survive.
The Santa Anas like to kick things up — leaves, little pieces of lint that rest in cracks of stuckle, and dandelions that make the air look dusty. Specks fly around and varnish surfaces for days to come.
My father gets home from the store and tells us the Santa Ana winds are blowing and “fucking everything up.” A few minutes later, it’s, “Let’s see what they’re gonna do.”
He gets angry about something, never names what it is, and storms around the house for a while, blasting music with lots of bass and drums and guttural noise. Then he slumps into the couch with the TV on as if nothing happened.
That was too simple for the winds — too benign. My father gets a text later in the day that a family friend has passed away. He was in town for a graduation party only six months ago, then diagnosed with a degenerative disease. He passed the night before the wind began.
Everything outside is unsteady, and even amongst the suburbs where nature is obstructed by houses and fences and parked cars, the Santa Anas roll in and remind us of this inherent desert. The land has been co-opted and built over, so the wind is the only way to be known.
The National Weather Service releases a wind advisory warning the inland areas — Escondido, El Cajon, Santee, San Marcos, La Mesa, Poway — will see the harshest wind. They’ll bring high seventies and sixties weather, not that any of this is strange.
People go to work, but as they type at computers or sit in meetings, they don’t pay much attention, looking out the windows at the palms being pulled to the left.
The schools are off for Thanksgiving, so kids lay on their stomachs in living rooms or walk into Target and out, not buying anything. They’re bored, so they start looking for trouble. There’s not much to make.
I wake up with what I think is a cold, a mild stuffed nose, and this aching pain in the back of my head, but by the time I’m up and dressed, it’s gone. The pain has come and gone for a few days now, and I can’t decide if it’s worth bringing up to the doctor, though she’ll probably tell me I’m dehydrated or need to sleep earlier.
If she’d read Didion or Chandler or Koontz, she might have told me it was the winds and their ability to tip a perfectly normal person into abnormality. It’s been building for some time, the anxiety over whether being tired is a sign of insomnia or a tumor. The feeling of doing everything wrong, that everyone is judging.
It all started around the time those high-pressure air masses started building over the Great Basin, and then the wind started moving westward through the desert and to the coast. In the news, a fire is burning in Riverside County, and there are warnings that California’s ecosystem is in a tailspin.
Cool-weather will return in time for Thanksgiving.
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