Red winds
Scattershot notes on the Los Angeles fire disaster
In the days since the Southern California fires began, it’s become a cliché to quote the three literary saints of Los Angeles on their arresting descriptions of the Santa Ana winds and their accompanying wildfires—the beatified in question being Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and Mike Davis. But I’m gonna cite them anyway.
Raymond Chandler’s detective novella Red Wind (collected in the volume Trouble is My Business) opened with the romantic menace of the winds—only to be tempered by a joke about drinking.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that 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. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Joan Didion’s “The Santa Anas” (from Slouching Towards Bethlehem), charts the same sense of malaise and dread spurred on by the regional wind phenomena.1
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.
The polemical LA writer Mike Davis, in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” (from Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster), made the hard-nosed argument that the immense resources put to defending wealthy Malibu homes from wildfires (and often ineffectual in their efforts) came into sharp contrast with the city’s historic negligence toward poorer neighborhoods in Westlake and DTLA:
Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over this century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea.
Still are the other bullets drawn from the laundry list of talking points recycled fire cycle after cycle. That the Santa Anas are not, in fact, named for some indigenous or Spanish word “Santanas” (i.e., “Satan-as”),2 but after the Santa Ana canyon where some of the winds originate. That California is prone to catastrophic wildfires, particularly after an exceptionally rainy season, generating more brush, is followed by an exceptionally dry one. That these fires are increasing in strength and magnitude as the climate warms. That they will happen again. And again.
I want to get past all that. That’s all old news, and addressed many thousand times over by so many writers, op-eds, and whatever ChatGPT is doing for Gen Z’s homework.
I want to talk about sense of place, and regional identity, and what it means for people when it all goes up in smoke.
No matter their background, the bereaved in the devastated communities of the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena, and other scorched neighborhoods all mourn the place they grew up. The school they went to, the place of worship, the corner store. What many don’t realize about Southern California who aren’t from here is that the Southland (or the “city-state”, as Rosecrans Baldwin calls it, himself perhaps the inheritor of the above literary trio’s legacy), is that Greater LA is defined by many small towns. It’s not one conventional city, it’s a thousand little cities stitched together in a tapestry forming the Southern California megalopolis. If, in the 1960s, the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis predicted the ecumenopolis, the coming, interconnected and unending world city, the vision of what that might mean starts here.
At the same time, a remarkable stoicism has been seen by many survivors in news reports, often saying that “stuff is stuff” and that they’re happy to have lived to tell the tale.
But sense of place remains elusive, slippery. I’m a transplant. I was born in SoCal, and I lived all over the place before coming back to it. I always had this idea that Americans were more comfortable with starting over. With one opportunity dashed, go somewhere else. Setting up shop in a new place was always the next move, the path to paradise and the pursuit of happiness. And for much of the 20th century, LA was the final destination.
Due to this ranging perspective, I found the rooted communal beliefs I encountered elsewhere baffling. When I lived in Cyprus, I interviewed many Cypriots displaced by the 1974 war—Turkish Cypriots fled to the north of the island, Greek Cypriots to the south. Their fierce attachment to their land and neighborhoods, despite the fact many technically remained in the same “country,” confused me.
Well, now that disaster has visited upon my hometown. The first years of my life were spent in Sierra Madre, a mountain town near Pasadena that has suffered burning and evacuation orders in the Eaton Fire. No member of my family lives there today, but there was always that mythical quality about it. And it’s true.
Even if logically we know that places are dangerous to live in, it’s very hard to leave or give them up. In 2024, Phoenix, Arizona, had 143 days in which the temperature crested above 100ºF. No one should really live there, not anymore. But people do.
History is littered with the legacy of civilizational collapse as a result of ecological instability. Both the Ancestral Pueblos (formerly known as “Anasazi”) and the Maya faced century-long droughts that brought the end of their golden ages (though it’s worth noting their peoples and languages persisted in other forms).
While the ideologically puritanical like Davis suggested it would be better for places like Malibu to not be rebuilt, I know they will be. Whether it’s noble or self-defeating, Californians don’t give up. From William Mulholland’s water “miracles” (theft) to the concrete hemming in the Los Angeles river, Californian attitudes have always been about triumphing over nature. That attitude culminates in a cycle of Pyrrhic victories in a war that can never be fully won. The price of paradise is that it is elusive. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?
If you’re looking to help victims of the LA fires (or need help yourself), Mutual Aid LA has formed the following spreadsheet of local organizations taking donations and offering aid.
“Diablo” is the word for “devil” in Spanish, making the “Santanas” false etymology pretty laughable.
Fabulous depiction of the history, the moment, and the reason for the anticipated future. Well done!
Great Read!