A September Song for Los Angeles

Many years back, my first labors as a reporter took place in the old city room of this newspaper. By good fortune I was given a desk next to a senior reporter. He was a quiet man who always dressed in a gray suit, always stored his stapler in the left drawer when he left for the night. And always took his vacations in September.

The September vacation struck me as peculiar, so one day I asked him why he departed our city on Labor Day each and every year, not to return until the first of October. He looked at me benignly for a moment and said, “You’ll know soon enough.”

And so I did. September, I now understand, is a special case in Los Angeles. Simply put, it’s a horror that has no equivalent in cities like New York or Paris. Or, for that matter, in Cleveland.

In those cities, September signals a sweet giving-up of the beast of summer. The rage of heat breaks and you can sense, or even smell, the coming change of season.

Not here. Our September retreats not one step. In fact, it picks up speed from August, galloping along like the horsemen of the apocalypse. September brings the worst of the dust, the worst of the prickly smogs. September brings the days when you walk out your door into the once-dewy mornings and feel the burn against your face.

As I write this, the remains of Hurricane Isis hang over the city. From my window, the landscape looks sodden, hang-dog. The temperature has hit 95 degrees. When the sun breaks through the oily clouds, I can actually see steam rising from the roofs of office buildings.

We all know that hurricanes are not supposed to hang over Los Angeles. But this is September, no? Nothing is too low, too sordid for September.

If it’s any comfort, the horror of our Septembers is not new. They’ve always been this way. More than half a century ago, the writer Stewart Edward White described the season thusly:

“Now the earth lay naked and baked. So hard and trodden looked this earth that it seemed incredible that any green thing had ever, or could ever again, pierce its steel-like shell. In the trees, the wind rustled dryly. In the sky the sun shone glaringly.”

That’s right. Somebody once remarked that in September the land in Los Angeles looks like a skull showing through the chaparral. So sere and brown is the brush that it seems you could crush it in your hand. Our September is all about death.

Except, of course, for the vermin. If September kills everything that is green, it seems to offer succor to any creature that crawls, slithers, bites or sucks blood. My God, where do they all come from?

*

The other day I sent my 7-year-old son to the garden for some carrots. These carrots, incidentally, exist only because they and a few other miserable remnants are protected by a 55% sunscreen. They huddle under the sunscreen, their tops drooping, looking as if they’d rather be dead with the rest of the vegetables.

Anyway, I send my son for the carrots. Dutifully, he sets off, carrying a stick in front of him pointed toward the sky.

What’s the stick for? To cut through the spider webs, naturally. In September, every overhanging bush, every house eve, every tree branch in Los Angeles has one or more spider webs hanging from it, ready to entwine the face and shoulders of the unwary.

In fact, you have not become a true citizen of Los Angeles until you’ve had a September spider web wrap itself around your sweating face. And then felt the prickly legs of the spider himself--one of those big, brown numbers--run frantically across your neck.

I called Blaine Hebert, the arachnidologist for the Museum of Natural History, to test my theory that Los Angeles contains more spiders than all the countries of the Western Hemisphere combined, and that September brings out the worst in each and every one.

Hebert would not agree. Obviously, he has not walked around my vegetable garden. But he pointed out that this season has been a good one for spiders, due to the abundance of El Nino-bred bugs that spiders eat, and predicted that next year the spider population will be larger yet.

“I got a tarantula call today,” said Hebert. “And I will get more before the month is out. Sometimes they walk through the back door and come marching across the dining room. It creates some wild scenes.”

I guess. We haven’t mentioned snakes that come crawling out of the bushes, looking for a cool spot in the bathroom, or scorpions that bite firefighters. Or Argentine ant colonies that walk away with your roast beef at 2 a.m. But they’re all present in September, enjoying their prime season.

*

Earlier this summer, I actually talked with someone who likes--no, loves--September in Los Angeles. He is an L.A. County lifeguard who says that September at the beach is perfect because the weather has remained hot and the crowds have gone.

“Every lifeguard knows the secret of September,” he said. “It’s the very best time.”

Sure it is. That’s because the rest of us are home nursing our scorpion bites. Or wondering when it will be cool enough to walk to the mailbox. Or reading about the cold snaps back East that are said to be harbingers of fall.

All of which brings me to my final theory. Do you remember all those New Year’s mornings when the day breaks warm and sunny over the Rose Bowl, and you turn on the TV to see a shot of Los Angeles from the Goodyear blimp that looks like something from a travel poster?

And did the question ever occur that you might eventually pay a price for living in a place that has such freakishly splendid weather when the rest of the country is all gray and ice-locked?

You will. You are. It’s called September.