When a Black Cat Dances

These are waiting days in the canyons of L.A. when the Santa Anas come howling across the mountains, hot and wild and dangerous, and smoke reddens the autumn sunset.

Temperatures rise as the humidity drops, creating a devil’s mix of dry grass and chaparral waiting to explode into flames from a spark, a match or a glowing torch.

This is, after all, October.

As I look from the window of my home in the Santa Monicas, the branches of the oak trees spin and twirl in the crazy winds, leaves fly in random patterns and the lavender blossoms of a distant bush skip across the driveway like flowers strewn in the path of a bride.

It’s Tuesday evening. A brush fire burns in Orange County’s Baker Canyon and its smoke trails across the western sky, painting the sunset a deep and glorious crimson, affirming the awesome beauty of nature even in disaster.

I half-listen to a radio as I write, keyed to the news that will tell me where the fires are and to what extent they are spreading.

When the Santa Anas blow, when the heat rises and the humidity drops, all of one’s senses are tuned to the danger of fire. I listen for sirens, watch the skies, smell the air for smoke and measure the rush of the winds.

The thrump, thrump, thrump of passing helicopters can penetrate concentration more quickly than a gunshot, because they are the birds of flame and their presence can be ominous.

As messengers of disaster, the Santa Anas are unique to L.A., and so is life in its canyons. Both were new to me when I brought my family here 25 years ago and found the home we loved in Topanga.

Even when I first felt the heat and intensity of the winds blowing down from the northeast I sensed no danger, only the excitement that a gale creates, blowing the world into a different form.

I watched our black cat leap and bound in the hot winds, something within her stirred by the calamity, and the sight of her dancing in that Halloween madness will always be my image of the season.

It wasn’t until 1978 when flames as high as heaven roared through the Santa Monicas like an advancing army, killing and destroying, that I understood the terrible power of a firestorm.

I stood on the roof of my home with a garden hose seeing, hearing and feeling the flames advancing across the mountains toward us, transforming the night sky into 100 shades of deep, wild reds and consuming the horizon with their devastating energy.

Transfixed by the towering menace, I realized the futility of facing so mighty an enemy with so foolish a weapon, but I couldn’t just do nothing and the hose stayed in my hands.

A shift of the winds turned the flames away, but 230 other houses were reduced to ashes and smoking timbers before the fire lay down in its bed of destruction. One man was killed in a futile effort to outrun the storm.

The season of danger can come anytime and can last for any number of months. In 1989 it came in July and wiped out 13 homes in Turnbull Canyon, in 1990 it came in June, destroying 641 homes from Santa Barbara to Orange county and east to San Bernardino.

But mostly the season begins in October and stretches to January. That’s the way it was in 1993, 1988, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1978, 1970, 1966, 1961, 1958, 1956, 1948, 1945, 1938, 1933. . . .

Wednesday morning. The air is still, the smoke gone, the Baker Canyon fire almost out. But evidence of the wind remains in a trail of broken branches, in the scattering of leaves and blossoms, in palm fronds strewn across the landscape and in the trees downed by a mighty force.

And it’s not over. We might have been lulled in the canyons by the high humidity and windless days of August and by the cool nights of September, but we knew deep within us that the Santa Anas would blow when October came.

I have written much lately of the weather in L.A., partially because of the persistent warnings that El Nino, like Godzilla, is about to gobble us up, but I can’t worry about that at the moment.

What fills the minds of those of us who live in the canyons and on the hillsides is the first rush of hot wind coming down from across the high deserts in bursts of power fired through the mountains.

Why live here at all? Life is a trade-off. I live here for the quiet nights and the misty mornings, for the distant howl of coyotes, for long walks up a mountain trail, for a place I know on a hilltop with a view to eternity.

But I can’t dismiss the immense danger that autumn brings, a season of trepidation born in that corner of the sky where the wild winds hide. And when they come again, as surely they will, I’ll stand amid the howling gales, waiting and wondering, as a black cat dances in a dark corner of memory illuminated by visions of fire that will never go away.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com