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Santa Ana: Patron Saint of Grace and Heat
by
It’s fire season again. In Los Angeles, this is the hottest season of the year. This is when you go to bed with the thinnest slip of sheet. This is the season when the curtains hang like lead against an open window. This is the season when bodies are too hot to touch. When we moved to Los Angeles two years ago, a plague of fires broke out across the foothills. I remember stepping out of an Office Depot with my bags in tow, when a man leaning against the wall pointed to the sky with his cigarette. "Look," he said, and through a thick haze which had covered Los Angeles for weeks and made everything smell like bonfire, I saw the sun hanging low and red, dim with ash. The fires that covered the sun in ash that year are the same fires whipped into a demonic frenzy every year by the same wind – the Santa Ana wind. A phenomenon all its own, the Santa Ana wind visits Los Angeles every October with a dry, oppressive heat. Joan Didion writes about it best in her essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” when she says, “October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously.”
The science behind the Santa Ana wind goes something like this: it begins in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, six hours northeast of Los Angeles. When high pressure systems build in the altitudes of the Great Basin and low systems deepen over Mexico, the air spills over the mountain ridge like a levee breeched, and begins to roll toward the lowlands of Southern California. As the desert air falls, it gets heavier and drier, hitting the foothills of LA like a mountain sized blow-dryer. The Santa Anas are named for the Santa Ana canyon. But many southern Californians believe the original name was santanas, meaning devil winds, similar to the Spanish word for "Satan." It would make sense, the torture of a wind that should refresh, but instead lights the land on fire. However, the name “Santa Ana” carries another meaning: Saint Anne. She is the patron saint of women in labor and miners. She is the mother of the Virgin Mary, and grandmother of Jesus. In her name lies "gracious one" and "grace." The Santa Ana wind which comes upon us with heat and fire carries with her damnation and hell, salvation and grace. She whips up fires that purge the hills and leave the earth black. She strips us of our homes, and vegetation, leaving nothing behind but memory and the purity of space. In her wake, we know we are human. We remember we can die without water here in the desert, that we have created an oasis with our hands. After all, the desert has a severe beauty, one which strips and steals and forces us to conquer or be conquered. In Southern California, we have won. We have defied the barren face of Los Angeles, and created a swirling basin of life. But every now and then the desert sends Santa Ana, who descends in a gust of saintly robes. She reminds us where we live, who's body we have plunged, and from whom we have cultivated life. |