More than 30 years of living in that "beautiful" climate taught me that Southern California has two seasons: fire and mud.
The fire season is year-round, but the worst time of the year for wildfires is late summer/early autumn. By then, temperatures have been high (typically in the 90s and 100s), sometimes for weeks on end, with very little break. After a few months of such conditions, the native chaparral and scrub have become tinderbox-dry. With no moisture from rainfall (which typically only comes in the winter, if it occurs at all), the hillsides are brown and skeletal, creaking like mournful ghosts. All it takes is one smoldering cigarette, a stray Santa Ana wind to fan the flames, and whole communities literally go up in smoke. And because most of the brush on the hillsides often burns to the ground, leaving nothing but blackened sticks, the soil has no anchorage, so when the rains finally do come (and they're often torrential, for brief periods), vast and devastating mudslides often result, during which considerable property and many lives can be lost.
A beautiful climate, indeed.
Adding greatly to the problem is the inability of many Southern Californians to understand that when they insist on building residences in a fire-prone area, they are literally playing with fire. As the ever-increasing population seeks new housing sites (and as urbanites who can afford it, flee the accelerating violence and squalor of the urban area), developers slash away the trees and build endless cookie-cutter communities in fire- and mudslide-prone areas. Well-heeled residents of the brushy foothill canyons that ring the Los Angeles Basin construct elaborate compounds "in a natural setting," far from the madding crowd but dangerously close to annihilation by wildfires.
Nobody seems to care that the fires are the direct result of the arid climate, which in turn creates the moisture-conserving, fire-prone vegetation. Fire is a natural component of the L.A. Basin’s dry-scrub chaparral landscape. It is necessary in the life cycle of many native plants, which spring up in greater numbers following a severe burn. Whether or not the inhabitants want to believe it, fire is always going to be a fact of life in Southern California.
It is interesting that no one in the Los Angeles basin seems to learn anything from ecology, meteorology...or history. Year after year, the fire season erupts, destroying acres of vegetation and homes and causing injuries and casualties. There are records of these disasters, and of the corresponding loss of life and property, going back at least 150 years. Before the coming of the white man, the Gabrielino Indians referred to the basin as "the plain of smokes," on account of the murky atmosphere, no doubt at least partially caused by frequent brush fires. Today, ecologists and naturalists speak out on the folly of continuing to live in such an arid, unforgiving climate without understanding the interplay of forces that inevitably result in brush fires.
But the population turns a deaf ear. All that climatological gloom and doom is bad for business. Infinitely compounding the problem is the fact that Californians are famous for organizing “tax revolts” that drastically cut services. Then, when they’re facing a situation like the present one, they complain that there aren't enough firefighters to go around. It’s all part of the same “cognitive dissonance”: California is the once and future state, a forward-looking Utopia where the past is irrelevant and Progress is the natural right of anyone who can afford it.
And where those who are in denial about the past seem forever condemned to repeat it.
If I were truly bitter, I would say they deserve what they get. But I’m not that bitter. I still have friends in the Los Angeles Basin. One of them, my close friend and musical cohort Victoria, e-mailed me yesterday: "The fires here are very, very scary. One may get to us here yet, if the wind changes direction through the night or this morning.......the closest I've ever been to evacuating. Man, this only supports my decision to get the hell out of here. Can you imagine what this tinder box is going to look like as soon as this thing blows out? Steve swears it's a terrorist act, quiet and very planned out. I don't know what I think about this caucasian 'arson' dude whose picture they're planting all over the TV lately......was expecting to see the face of a Middle Eastern man but there are terrorist links of all colors these days. Yes, the air and the sky has been so polluted with ash and the heavy stink of fuel (where's that coming from?) and thick smoke and so dry, dry, dry!
"Awful here."
As you’ve surely heard on the news, many other areas in Southern California, from Santa Clarita on the north to as far south as San Diego, are also being engulfed in flames. This is the worst fire season in decades, maybe in the past century. Victoria lives in Northridge, a few miles from the closest fires in Simi Valley. Evidently there aren't enough firefighters to combat the Simi Valley conflagration, and it's threatening to jump into densely-populated areas of the San Fernando Valley like Northridge.
My heart goes out to Victoria. But she’s one of the smart ones. She’s moving back to her native Midwest next spring.
As I write this I’m sitting here in Setauket, looking out my window at a lush, green landscape. It rained heavily this morning and now the sun is starting to emerge from the clouds, shining down gently through the thicket of trees in my yard. The temperature is a comfortable 55 degrees; relative humidity is 83%. The air smells of rain, of damp earth, of autumnal repose.
I can’t gloat. I love living here. I hated being in L.A. That doesn’t make me a genius or a seer, or any more deserving than anyone else. It just means I finally became aware of the larger picture, and that even as a native Angeleno I could no longer accept an absurd and deadly climatological mythology.
It took me long enough.
When this fire season is finally over, how many people will be homeless? How many will have lost family, friends, co-workers? How many overworked firefighters will have been killed or injured in the line of duty?
Will Southern California learn anything from this agonizing season of fear, torment, loss?
Or will they continue to robotically repeat "It's a beautiful climate"?
