Santa Ana Winds

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this

afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What

it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a

hot wind from the northeast whining down through the

5

5 Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms

out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the

flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back

in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have

neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I

10

10 know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it

too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The

maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the

telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down,

given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the

15

15 Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a

deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles

and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians

would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind

20

20 blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously

glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the

night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the

olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was

surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light 

25

sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only

neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and

there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed

the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that

he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

30

30 “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote

about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and

study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That

was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that

35

35 there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but

it turns out to be another of those cases in which science

bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named

for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind,

like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the

40

40 khamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent

malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are

the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but

a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the

leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air 

45

45 begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the

mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.

Whenever and wherever a foehn blows, doctors hear

about headaches and nausea and allergies, about

“nervousness,” about “depression.” In Los Angeles some

50

50 teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during

a Santa Ana, because the children become

unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up

during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss

cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance

55

55 for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because

blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few

years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only

during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which

precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of

60

60 positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly

why that should be; some talk about friction and others

suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions

are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in

the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot

65

65 get much more mechanistic than that.