The Rainmaker Will Douse the Fires

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It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the hot, urgent Santa Ana foehn winds fueled devastating fires in the Los Angeles area. But this most recent episode might be the most horrific of all, arriving on the tail of an extremely dry season and following the hottest year ever on record.

This isn’t a forest fire burning acres of trees in a remote area; this one is burning houses, businesses, critical infrastructure, vehicles; destroying neighborhoods, claiming lives, generating clouds of toxic smoke.

Santa Ana winds are believed to affect people’s moods and behavior—never for the better—symbolizing what the New York Times called in 2003 “an unnamable menace lying just beneath the sun-shot surface of California life.”

The Californian novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote about the Santa Ana winds in “The Los Angeles Notebook” in 1968: “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

I’d say teetering on the edge.

Mystery writer and noir novelist Raymond Chandler wrote in “Red Wind” that “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that 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.”

Meek wives holding carving knives and sizing up their husband’s necks? Now there’s an image.

The Santa Ana winds have always been a natural phenomenon. But the rest of the culprits? It’s pretty clear to me that we (humanity, people, politicians) aren’t going to take any of the necessary steps to mitigate the chances of horrific fires and their corresponding destruction of life and property. Is fire upon fire upon fire our destiny?

Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, said she hoped this wasn’t a sign of things to come, “because we’ve barely seen any climate change compared to what we are going to get unless we radically cut CO2 emissions.”

Barely seen any climate change—that’s okay. Our leaders have a plan: “Drill baby, drill.” And “Deregulation!”

The lessons of the fires are obvious and enduring, but the learning is almost nonexistent. The learning is ignored, or minimized, or called fake news, or postponed until a more desperate future—a future of Armageddon? Fire will be the instrument that delivers the end of the world, according the Bible.

Maybe we’re waiting for a miracle, like those you get in the Bible. Maybe we’re waiting for the Rainmaker to mystically appear in gilded robes, with his piercing powerful eyes and raised arms and rhythmic chanting to the skies. The Rainmaker will put the fires out and we will be saved!

That’s fine for the fires. What about the hurricanes, the blizzards, the ice storms, the drought, the tornadoes?

By David Klein

David Klein

Published novelist, creative writer, journalist, avid reader, discriminating screen watcher.

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