Los Angeles magazine, November 2008

From the Archives

In The Line Of Fire

Only two spectacles guarantee L.A. national attention every year, the Academy Awards and autumn’s Santa Ana wind fires. Both are huge productions accompanied by costs in the millions; both deliver movie stars in varying states of distress and questionable attire.

A town known for extremes deserves a contrary wind, and L.A.’s Santa Anas bestow a season of disaster while also polishing the most harmonic of days. They are the Eastside’s revenge on the Westside, returning the smog bank over the San Gabriel Valley to origins near the coast. Cities windier than Los Angeles exist in the United States—Cheyenne, Wichita, Amarillo, Des Moines—but the Santa Anas get all the attention. As name recognition among weather systems goes, they have the highest Q rating west of the Rockies. They are meteorology’s own Madonna.

One of the strangest experiences L.A. offers newcomers is waking to a Santa Ana. The previous fall night may have been cool, even misty. After sunrise, the initial view outside is of a blue void that glimmers with surreal clarity. A dry static charge has replaced the evening fog. One glides through the humidity-free air rather than walks in it, an encounter with absence that’s like a subtle flavor inexplicably missing from a favorite dish. The morning news features live feeds of small mountain towns staggered by high winds and wildfire. Yet stepping into the garden, one feels no breeze at all. Somewhere the Southland is being blown to hell, and L.A. has never looked more promising.

Atop the Santa Monica Mountains and in Orange County, Santa Ana winds have been clocked at speeds above 110 mph—the force of a Category 3 hurricane like Katrina when it made landfall in Louisiana. Pairing disaster with grandeur, the winds have acquired mythological powers. Alternately they are said to incite distraction, sadness, numb brutality, Chunky Monkey binges. Swiftly violent, lacking motive, the Santa Anas are the only winds that have been channeled into a literary genre, L.A. noir. They connect the famous opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind”—“Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump”—to works by Joan Didion, linking L.A.’s arcadian dazzle with its nightmares.

Usually wind blows into L.A. from the Pacific, a daytime airflow generated as the sun warms the desert and coastal plains. When in early October the year’s premier Santa Ana stirs, it wakes at night. The sun is no longer dominant, the desert is cooling, and the Santa Ana can begin its flight to the sea. Other things awaken with it. Dogs pace their yards, livestock low in their pens, and firebugs stepping outdoors feel the heat and itch of the wind between their fingers. At what hour do our first Santa Ana fires ignite? Midnight, or two in the morning, or at four a.m. They tend to start in Malibu, where the winds initially alight. Only later do the mountains of Orange County and San Diego glow, as gusts pitch from north to south and fire agencies scramble to keep abreast.

If you wanted to pick a spot at which the Santa Anas gather their force—a point of embarkation for the 50, 60, 90 mph blasts that career through Soledad Canyon and into Santa Clarita, San Fernando, Simi Valley, and Malibu—you could do no worse than to settle on the trim front yard of Gary and Celeste Thornhill. The Thornhills live on the scrubby edge of southern Palmdale. They manage a public storage facility—it is their backyard—off Avenue R, a mile from the San Andreas Fault.

Gary Thornhill has led a life intimate with disaster. He is 70 years old and was raised in the town of Santa Ana, where, he says, “the wind blew so hard that the windows whistled, and when Modjeska Canyon burned you could hear the pop and crackle.” For two decades he hustled as a newspaper photographer, capturing floods, fires, temblors, and highway wrecks. As a kid Gary imagined that the Santa Anas were born in nearby Santa Ana Canyon. Today he knows better. He is a National Weather Service volunteer, measuring the speed and humidity of winds that course across his front yard before they enter Soledad, where Celeste grew up. “In the big blows back then with the static charge,” she says, “you could watch the sparks fly off your ears.”

Each day Gary records the temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and wind speed—four parts to an equation that helps identify a Santa Ana. His marriage to Celeste is a working union. Celeste types out the numbers, and Gary faxes them to the National Weather Service, which in turn issues warnings to fire agencies when the Santa Anas are imminent.

The Santa Anas create L.A.’s best beach days and the planet’s worst fire weather. If you look at just three years—2007, 2003, and 1993—more than 6,000 homes were destroyed by Santa Ana fires, housing loss that surpasses that of the Northridge earthquake. Given the annihilating potential of the Santa Ana winds, you’d think by now we’d be able to define them. Hurricanes are broken into five categories, tornadoes into six. Every day the Thornhills send the National Weather Service four numbers supposedly used to decode the presence of a Santa Ana. The problem is, nobody can agree on what constitutes a Santa Ana. There is no definition for North America’s most famous wind.