Those Santa Ana Winds

The Santa Ana winds are here again. I could feel it before I turned on the TV last night and heard the meteorologist’s expert prediction that: “It’s going to be hot, hot, hot and very, very dry. And windy.” Behind her, the map of San Diego County behind her was splashed with red almost to the coast. The temperatures were already rising last night—that unnatural, arid heat was setting in. The wind hasn’t even started yet in earnest, but the sun is already relentlessly bright and my head is pounding. The rage has set in. Perhaps rage isn’t exactly the right word. It’s more like desperation, anxiety, anger, a feeling of not being able to take it for another second. Well, maybe rage is the right word, after all. One wants to shave one’s head and rearrange one’s skin so that it fits better over one’s body. Outside, it feels something like this scene from Total Recall which I’ve always felt sure was inspired by a particularly brutal Santa Ana.

The Santa Ana winds have inspired some memorable passages in fiction (even I took a crack at it in my novel, The Neighbors Are Watching), but none are as succinct and spot-on as Raymond Chandler’s opening paragraph in “Red Wind.” It’s all there in those six sentences. The unease, anxiety, and desiccation.

Though there is work to be done in the kitchen today, I am a bit concerned how it might turn out. The last time the Santa Ana winds raged through these parts, I made this.

The knife is edible.