Now Is the Non-Winter of Discontent
For weeks now the rains have been due. And for weeks the Santa Ana winds have come in their place, and then come again. In the mornings I walk out on my patio, just to check. It’s always the same. The sky still calm and blue, the air so dry it feels peppery against my skin.
Over the weekend I looked down at the pansies running along the fence. They were drooping again, their faces turned down into the dirt. Poor pansies, they weren’t ready for this. I gave them a splash from the hose, but I knew, and the pansies knew, that something was wrong. Our winters seem to have disappeared.
I use the term “winter” advisedly, of course, this being Southern California. What I mean is that change in the air that comes in mid-autumn, a switch from the light, dusty air of summer to something heavy and marine. The air of winter rolls off the Pacific in deep currents and fills the L.A. Basin with coolness and bite. This air has heft, and its arrival says the rains are coming.
Except that it hasn’t happened, not for the past three years. The real marine air hasn’t showed, and without it the winters have resembled pale versions of summer, with the same dry air and thin sunlight. Now, two days before Thanksgiving, it seems to be happening again. No rain.
I have a friend who keeps checking, like I do. She says every two or three weeks she gets fooled. She will walk out her front door in the morning and sense that the winter change is about to take place. The air will be colder and damp, and she will say to herself, this must be it.
But it’s not. The next day the Santa Ana’s will be back and the temperatures will push toward the 90s. It leaves her feeling teased, she says, because she loves the rains and looks forward to them each fall. When the Santa Ana’s hang on and on, her skin peels and goes itchy. She pictures herself molting in the dry non-winter.
No one is certain just what has happened to our winters. Some climate experts believe Southern California may be experiencing a first dose of the greenhouse effect. Last summer I talked to one scientist in San Bernardino who subscribes to this notion and says that, ironically, the deserts may be the first victims. The drought already has cut dramatically into the variety of plant life in the Mojave, he says, and full recovery would require three straight years of above-average rainfall. He’s not sure the Mojave will get it.
Others regard this explanation as alarmist. The current stretch of rainless winters is likely part of a cycle, they say, a cycle that is governed by surface ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific. When the temperature goes down out there, rainfall drops here.
If that is true, the most recent readings from the Pacific should be good news. It seems that temperatures have risen off the South American coast. The weathermen who favor this theory say the coming winter could still bring a heavy dose of rain. We’ll see. Weathermen make a lot of promises they don’t keep.
In writing this lament about our missing winters, I realize it leaves me in something of a minority. At the end of the past weekend I watched the local news, and the second story recounted the day’s Santa Ana weather. There was no gloom in this report.
A young man was interviewed at Zuma. He had just gone for a run in the hills and “could see Catalina.” Now he was rewarding himself with a few hours at the beach. Here it was November and temps were pushing the mid-80s. Too much, he said. This is what L.A. is all about.
That’s right, for the most part. It’s been that way for a hundred years. In the first decades of the century, Los Angeles newspapers regularly denied that it ever rained here. They referred to wet episodes as “heavy mists.” This was about the same time a prominent land developer analyzed his success this way: “We sold them the climate and threw the land in.”
Too bad that old geezer can’t be reconstituted for the new, modern L.A. He’d love our non-winters. He could sell climate from October to April, and never have to worry about a heavy mist clouding his pitch.
