Now Comes the Age of Santa Anas

All I wanted was the straight poop on the Santa Anas. How many times, I asked, had the Santa Anas come whistling through the passes in the past year? A hundred times, like it seemed? Were we entering an Age of Santa Anas? That’s all I wanted to know.

But the man on the telephone had no answers. The government, he said, does not track the Santa Ana winds.

You see, the man said, Santa Anas are not official events. The government only counts things certified as official. Your hurricanes, your tornadoes, they’re official. “Santa Ana,” he said, is a term invented by novelists and TV weathermen.

I hung up the phone and looked out the window. It was a Santa Ana, all right. Another one. The air was a grainy yellow and you could smell the dust when you breathed. All the plants, even the trees, looked exhausted. The cat’s fur was standing straight out again, giving him a look of perpetual fright.

Worst of all was my lettuce patch. It was the lettuce patch, in fact, that had led me to my theory about the Age of Santa Anas being upon us. Since early autumn I have been trying to grow a patch of lettuce in my back yard. Each time the little buds poke through the soil, the Santa Anas come back and fry the lettuce a crispy brown. Last weekend it happened again. By now, of course, it is November. My lettuce was being immolated in November.

In truth, I could not remember an old-time November where the rains came like they were supposed to. All I could remember were Novembers filled with dust and cracked lips.

For nostalgia’s sake, I started rooting around my bookshelf, trying to find a description of the way things used to be. And suddenly, there it was, in “Southern California, An Island on the Land,” Carey McWilliams’ idiosyncratic history of Southern California. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that book, just enough to remind you what it was like:

“By November,” McWilliams wrote, “people have begun to listen for rain. And then (it) comes, drifting in long graceful veils, washing the land, clearing the atmosphere: the gentlest baptism imaginable. The people have known to a moral certainty that these rains would come; they have been expecting them; and, yet, they are forever delighted and surprised when they appear. The earth is reborn, the year starts anew, with the rains.

“After these first rains--which fall gently, never in torrents--the sun is softer: it no longer burns, the air is cool and fragrant, and the hills begin to change. The land is clothed in a freakish greenery, a green so bright that, at times, it is almost sickening.”

Do you remember that green? I do. It used to be, you could mark the seasons by the coming and going of that green. Now you may see a tinge of color in the hills by March but it is not the real green, the California green. We have not seen that green for a long time.

These days, we just get the hot breath from the desert, reminding us that our region is desert-born and perhaps is doomed to be desert once again. I was still wondering about the sheer number of Santa Anas in recent years when the man from the government called back. He had a tip.

It seems, he said, there was a retired professor in Northridge who counted Santa Anas. A hobby or something. This would not be an official count, he reminded me, and certainly not a government count. Nonetheless, I might want to call.

I did. His name is Arnold Quart and once he taught geography at Cal State Northridge. Quart does not keep a day-by-day count of the Santa Anas either. But he watches them each season and studies their pattern, just as he has for 30 years.

In large part, Quart agreed with me: We have indeed entered an Age of Santa Anas. He estimates that their frequency has doubled in the past five years. The fact that this doubling coincides roughly with the years of the drought in California may or may not have significance, he said.

Quart is hopeful, though. The Santa Anas come and go, he said, for reasons that no one understands. In the ‘60s we had lots, then in the ‘70s they faded.

It’s like a run of royal flushes in poker, Quart said. You just never know.

Maybe he’s right. It’s only November, after all, and there’s still lots of winter left. Still time for the rains to come and turn the hills to green.

But somewhere I stopped believing in those rains. And what do you wanna bet that next week, Thanksgiving week, when we sit down to our harvest dinners, we will stare out the window to a land still filled with prickly heat?