Dancing With the Devil Winds and Other Signs of the Season
So now it is nearly autumn, and the only leaves that tend to fall around here are the ones off the calendar proclaiming it so.
Across the Norman Rockwell latitudes of America, the smell of autumn is the welcome fragrance of smoke, the bonfires of oak leaves and maple leaves in back yards and open fields.
The autumn can smell of smoke in Southern California, too, smoke rising up from brush and trees and hillsides, and even neighborhoods set ablaze. Fall is the burning season, and the smell of smoke is the smell of our fear.
As the heat dies away from the rest of the country, it is only cranking up here. The winds begin to veer away from the ocean and instead hurtle down out of the parched mountains like flamethrowers. In other parts of the world they have other names--the foehn, the simoom. Here they are the Santa Anas, the devil winds. They dry the dense, luxuriant brush that springs up after the winter rains. They fray our tempers like old electric cords. When the Santa Anas blow, Raymond Chandler wrote, meek housewives finger their carving knives and eye the backs of their husbands’ necks.
As for the rest of us, we eye the skies. In the car, we listen to the news. At home, we listen for sirens, sniff for the first thread of smoke, watch for where the blue sky ends and the charcoal one begins.
It is fashionable to hold that the fires are a chastisement, as earthquakes are a chastisement, for the arrogance of living perilously among the graceful trees and the vivid hillsides of this land, trying to thwart in half a century what nature has practiced for half an eon.
Long before those canyons and the hillsides filled with houses, a California poet named Robinson Jeffers wrote this of the fires that advanced like armies across the landscape:
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The deer were bounding like blown leaves under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brush fire
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful . . .
An eagle was perched on the jag of a burnt pine . . .
He had come from far off for the good hunting with fire for his beater . . .
The sky was merciless blue and the hills merciless black . . .
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.
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The last time the fires ate across the foothills, I worked up a drill. Quick now, in 15 minutes--what would I pack? How many boxes could I carry off if fire drew close to me? How much could I take? How much did I need?
As the season changes now from summer to smoke, I wait, and I hope that this year I will not have to watch the drifting ash from the ruin of other people’s houses, carried on merciless devil winds, settling down like dead snowflakes around my own.
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And then winter comes to the sere earth, and the pummeling rains, and the dust and ash are washed clean. Spring storms in, and if you can find some wide place that has not been sowed with stucco houses, the flowers still grow wholesale, by acres and hectares, from range to mountain range, sky to sky, sheets of them, fields of them, rippling in the wind like Technicolor wheat.
The California poppy is the state flower, the one the 49ers pressed into their letters home from the Gold Rush. Nowadays you can be fined as much as a thousand dollars and sent to jail for six months for picking even one on protected land. When the Queen of England came here to visit 16 years ago, she wore an evening gown embroidered with them, a tribute to a desert flower with petals like chiffon.
Just when the eye is burned to satiety by the searing-sweet yellow-orange of poppies, there, like a wave from the Pacific, is a blue-violet expanse of lupine, a purple haze alternately vivid and shadowed as the breeze bends the cones of blossom in the sunlight.
In the brief weeks before they are gone, they bloom with vigor, these poppies. They sprout up in the exhaust fumes and concrete of freeway medians, they spring horizontally out of the scant earth of rocky hillsides--for all their frail stems and translucent petals--as hardy as the men and women who were Californians long before air conditioning and internal combustion engines.
Connoisseurs know the brilliant wildflower seasons and the sparse ones as wine lovers know French vintages; had Monet, in his early years, come to California in the spring, perhaps he never would have needed to bother planting a garden in Giverny.
It is nearly autumn; here the seasons do indeed turn, but with the subtle stateliness of the earth on its ellipsis around the sun, and only those dazzled to blindness by the garish artifice of the human landscape believe otherwise.
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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
