Sitting in my Brooklyn dining room, I hear news on WNYC that wild fires continue to burn their way through Southern California.  500,000 have been evacuated from their homes, the largest evacuation in California history.

The Santa Ana winds are partly to blame.

The Santa Ana winds with their hurricane like speeds, the weather, and the dryness brought on by drought have conspired to make this a devastating natural tragedy the likes of which LA has never seen.

Joan Dideon wrote about the Santa Ana winds in her magnificent book of essays, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." If it’s not in this collection, please let me know. Here’s an excerpt.

"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 Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to 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 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 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 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 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.

"Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland.  That is quite misleading.  In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes:  two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.  At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.  The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.  In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains…"