So Hot, so Cool, so Diverse, so L.A.

The roadside thermometer near my office registers 106 degrees as I head out to pick up my daughter from camp. By the time we get home, she is hot, sweaty and irritable . . . and more than a little confused.

“How’d it get so hot out here?” she asks. “It was so nice and cool earlier today.”

Now I’m the one confused. It’s been brutally hot out here all day--all week, all summer, it seems.

104, 107, 109. Each day brings a new level of mind-numbing heat as the San Fernando Valley suffers through one of its most miserable summers on record.

Maybe, I think, the unremitting sun has addled her brain. I try to recall what I know of heatstroke. Could confusion be one of its symptoms? Is she imagining cool breezes, much like a person stranded in the desert might imagine an oasis mirage?

Or is she just discovering the Los Angeles I know, a place where comfort is relative and life is a constantly shifting tableau?

*

She’d left the Valley early that morning, bound for the beach on an air-conditioned bus. It was bright but not yet hot. The sun had just begun to climb.

The campers headed up the hill to Mulholland Drive, then descended along the 405 to the coast. When they disembarked at Venice Beach, they found cloudy skies and breezes so cool that they shivered in their tank tops and shorts.

Soon the sun came out and warmed the ocean air, turning the boardwalk pleasantly warm as they skated and biked, shopped and browsed. It was already cooling down--from a high of about 75--when they boarded the bus to return to Chatsworth . . . where the temperature had hit triple digits and still had not peaked.

How, in the space of 45 minutes and 30 miles, could the mercury rise by almost 30 degrees?

“When we were at the beach, weren’t we still in L.A.?” my daughter asked later that night as she splashed cool water on her face, trying to re-create those few hours of heat-wave reprieve.

“How could it be so different from one place to the other--and still be the same place?”

How indeed? My answer had to do with air flow and sea breeze and high pressure systems that trapped the hot air, but the question really goes beyond weather, to the very essence of this place we call home.

*

It is wise, the weather experts say, to think of Los Angeles not as a single region but as a variety of “microclimates” so meteorologically diverse that nothing else in the country compares.

“Southern California is unique unto itself,” says meteorologist Kevin Stenson of WeatherData Inc., a national forecasting service based in Wichita, Kan. “You can go from sea level to over 10,000 feet in a matter of a few miles. . . . A difference of five miles can totally change the topography of the land and create dramatic shifts in weather conditions.”

So in a single day, we can have clouds and fog on the coast, where the ocean keeps the air cool and moist, while Pasadenans choke on heat and smog and the Valley bakes under clear skies and a blazing sun.

And how we experience life in this vast metropolis--and what we expect from the lives we live--can depend on where and how we spend our days.

Those who drive from their cool, fog-shrouded homes into downtown L.A. each day feel the musty heat’s oppressive squeeze. I head in from Chatsworth and, at 90 degrees, downtown feels like cool relief.

It’s a metaphor, this weather stuff, for the experience of living in a city so vast and diverse that everything is relative and it’s hard sometimes to see beyond your own front gate.

My kids complain about our Valley digs: too old, too small, the only house in the world without a pool. True enough, if you compare it only with those mansions rising in the hills we can see.

But there’s a world of difference beyond this neighborhood of ours. So we drive over the hill to visit friends in the city, or venture east to Pasadena or south to Redondo Beach, and they are struck by the habitats they see: old houses with front porches, screen doors, big backyards; tiny homes, crammed onto narrow streets, with bars on the windows and no front lawns; apartment buildings with graffiti on the walls; condos with lobbies and doormen at the gates--and it’s all L.A.

When this week’s news was full of hot weather blues, it must have seemed irrelevant to those folks in Dana Point or Pacific Palisades, where they had to don sweaters to enjoy the evening breeze.

Stories about triple-digit temperatures and how to keep cool don’t reflect their reality any more than stories about drive-by shootings resonate in those gated communities near my home.

We are, in ways beyond weather, microclimates here--separate yet connected by our own sort of air flow and high pressure, defined by topography that sometimes feels like it’s shifting beneath your feet.

And so, like my daughter, we can shiver and sweat in the course of a day. We can go from comfortable to miserable, from the familiar to the frightening, from the disappointing to the sublime--and know, for better or worse, it’s all still L.A.

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.