The Fall of L.A. : A Subtle Change in the Seasons Is Under Way and in the Air

The weatherman was hedging his bets but, yes, this just might be the week. It just might be autumn in L.A.

Drizzle due at the Downtown Civic Center. Cold front hovering to the north and west. Those signs, the weatherman allowed carefully, were indeed harbingers of fall--meteorologically speaking, anyway.

But you can’t be too sure, he emphasized no less than three times. And it’s true--autumn here is an equivocal thing. This, after all, is the place that for decades promoted itself as a land without seasons, a city of perpetual blue skies. No wonder the East Coast has cornered the market on symbols of the equinox.

Nobody notices whether there’s frost on the pumpkins in the Halloween display at Ralphs. No one writes eloquent couplets about the leaf-blower’s mighty buzz. So you have to find your own signs of fall--in the number of days left till the El Cholo chain of Mexican restaurants stops serving green corn tamales; in the way the street vendors no longer cleave to the edge of the sidewalk in search of shade; in the crisp, amber quality the air suddenly acquires; in the way the Santa Anas demolish your lips.

Technically, it has been autumn from coast to coast since Sept. 23, but only the most discerning Angeleno could have told you so without a calendar.

Six of the past 10 days have broken 85 degrees, and the signs of fall have, as usual, been in your more climate-controlled areas--in the supermarkets where apples are on sale, a buck and a half for five pounds, and in the malls, where back-to-school mannequins are modeling plaid woolen skirts that make you scratchy just to look at them.

But in the past few days, reports have begun filtering in, from sources that are more elementally inclined.

Sources, for example, like Kevin Anderson, a 38-year-old Hermosa Beach surfboard salesman who’s been surfing since he was 14 and who noticed the change “probably three or four days ago, when the first cold currents started coming in.”

Autumn for Southern California surfers, Anderson said, begins with the first northerly swells, “and when you jump in, it’s a real definite rush.”

Late last week, Anderson said, the rush arrived.

“It was around 60 (degrees), where before it had been 66 or 67,” he said, “and you knew it was time for a spring suit where, before, you were barebackin’ it.”

Across town at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, botanical director Jim Folsom also could have told you so: The chorisia were in bloom--those tall trees with the big, pink blossoms--and the begonias and impatiens “were starting to look beat up.”

So for them, it’s no surprise that, this weekend, people didn’t feel like firing up the barbecue.

Or that, according to meteorologist Kris Farnsworth of WeatherData, Inc., an upper level low-pressure system is hovering over Nevada, creating considerable cloudiness and low fog throughout much of the region.

This week, says Farnsworth, might be that pivotal, quintessentially Californian point between the fire season and the winter rains.

Or not.

“It’s going to feel like autumn for this week at least,” Farnsworth laughed. “To say more than that would be pushing it.”