Ashes: a poem & Joan Didion’s “The Santa Anas”

Ashes

California burns every autumn: this
time far enough away not to worry
me for my safety but close enough to rain
ashes on my clean laundry, on my green
tomatoes. They swirl under and around
my bare feet as I water containers
of natives I will plant Saturday.

My familiar hillside view obscured:
drifting smoke scatters sun’s rays only
oranges and reds filter through making
mid-afternoon as twilight oddly
appropriate for this Halloween time
of year. I wish for a full moon rising,
glowing; the rooster too is confused.

In the barranca, monarchs chase each
other, vibrant flames, insistent, blazing.
Male and female look alike but it is
he who latches on to her abdomen
and he who keeps them aloft above the
monitoring eyes of my black cat.
Stretching skyward he leaps, lunges, changes

this from a dance of reproduction to
the chase of predator and prey.
His brother rolls on his back, soot
disappears into his grey coat. He’s learned
the bittersweetness of such poisonous
play, prefers to observe the red house
finch in the ash flecked banana tree.

This fire I cannot see began in the
mountains behind Piru, fading town, earth
quake ravaged, now Hollywood movie set.
In Piru my sister-in-law’s grandmother
died when the fire began. I’m forbidden
to tell you how they loved her, honored her
passing. It is too private a moment.

I cried. Grief too burns. My nephews–they’ve
lost five great grandparents this year. I am
grateful they knew them at all. My children
never will. In yoga practice, the last
pose is shivasana, corpse pose. Body,
mind, spirit lets go, quiet, supported
by earth, bringing renewal, peace, rebirth,

new growth. California burns every
autumn, a time of death and birth as the
nutrients rain down. I understand it
is the Chumash New Year. Careful of
poppy seedlings, I will plant wooly blue
curls, milkweed, sages on Saturday: at
night, listen to owls. Go butterflies go.

poem c. by Gwendolyn Alley aka Art Predator

I wrote this poem a few years ago and published it in ARTLIFE Limited Editions as a simple broadside–a beautiful creamy paper with flecks of orange and other colors embedded and I burned a corner of every page of the edition of 220 (150 of which went to ArtLife).

I choose to publish this today for two reasons. It is just a few weeks past the fall equinox which is the time the local Chumash celebrate the “new year” and harvest through the annual Hutash festival (Hutash created the people and led them across the rainbow bridge from the Channel Islands to the coastland. People who fell off the bridge became dolphins.)

And the famed “Santa Anas” have arrived. East winds which fuel fire blow the eucalyptus trees outside my windows wildly today. Several fires burn out of control and freeways and schools are closed. Clouds of smoke appeared on the southern horizon toward LA where the fires are burning. I hope my clothes dry on the line before the ashes start raining down…but after two drought years, the damage is likely to be severe and great as long as the wind blows in from the great dry deserts to the east of us. (For an AP story posted on yahoo on the fires, go here)

Let us pray the wind calms soon so the firefighters can contain the blazes, the sky will clear– and I can ride my bike to the beach to pick up the boy from school.

Here is Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Ana” (excerpted 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, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.  For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.  I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too.  We know it because we feel it.  The baby frets.  The maid sulks.  I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.  To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

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.

“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “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.”  That was the kind of wind it was.  I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.  The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel.  There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics:  it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.  Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.  In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime.  Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.  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.  No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances.  In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.  One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

Easterners commonly complain that there is no “weather” at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland.  That is quite misleading.  In fact the climate 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.  At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.  The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.  In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place.  The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4.  On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour.  In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects.  On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control.  On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths.  On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself.  On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car.  On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour.  On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.  The city burning is Los Angeles’s 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.