Nature again shows who’s boss

A windy day in the City of Angles.

Santa Anas howl down from the Northeast, rushing over mountains and desert, winding through canyons, blasting over city streets.

We knew in advance they were coming. TV meteorologist Dallas Raines told us, eyes bright with excitement, predicting, warning, rising to his expertise, a prince of the weather.

But we are still startled by the sound, the strength and the sheer immensity of the gale that comes in the night and stays through the day. We turn to face it, gauging, wondering, trying to grasp its omnipotence.

Gusts blast the city at 70 miles an hour. This is no Katrina, but for a town that often sleepwalks through its everyday business, a weatherless basin slumbering in the sun, it’s high drama, big news. Everybody notices.

Fires break out. Trees topple. RVs and semis are blown off the road, collapsing on their sides like stricken dinosaurs. Power goes out. Houses stop humming with energy. Computers crash.

The cat Ernie spins and twirls as tree limbs drum a rhythm on our roof. He’s electrified by the newness in his life, looking out the window, touching the glass with a paw, reaching for the wind, a discovery in winter.

I drive through the city. The car rocks in blasts of wind as I stop at intersections. Gusts rush down the open avenues like panicked horses, flying over the asphalt, pounding against stores, leaping over homes, knocking down billboards and power poles.

Palm fronds are whipped to the ground, pepper trees cracked in half, leaves scattered like butterflies. Nothing seems stationary, everything moves.

Papers twirl in midair, caught up in the twisting, pulling patterns of the Santa Anas, wild by nature, unpredictable by design. Plastic bags rise like parachutes in sudden updrafts, pulled sideways by the horizontal blasts. A single balloon, jerked from a child’s hand, flies by.

They’re not over, Raines warns, charting patterns of dust over the ocean, blown by the same winds that have scrubbed the skies of L.A. into glowing brilliance, free of the smog that so often blurs it, gleaming with new radiance.

The air heats up, and humidity drops like a low moan. Fifteen percent. Nine percent. Arson watchers move stealthily through the canyons. Fire trucks and civilian volunteers. Allen Emerson is our guy. Red alerts intensify his patrols. When Raines warns, Emerson listens. He watches the skies, sniffs the air and drives slowly over the twisting roads.

Wind intensity varies. In one area it’s a breeze; in another, palm trees bend like supplicants to a higher power. Doors are blown inward. Windows shatter. A tennis ball, hit straight, soars upward. A tumbleweed abandons a casual roll and flies across a highway. Skirts are blown up. Allergies flare. Pedestrians bend into the gusts, squinting.

“There are no limits to either time or distance,” journalist Hal Borland once wrote. “I have to touch the wind to know these things.”

There is mystery to the wind and drama to the Santa Anas. Borland touched the heart of the wind to know time and distance. Bob Dylan sought answers blowin’ in the wind. Poet Edward Fitzgerald summarized life: “I come like water and like wind I go.”

And always one is drawn to Raymond Chandler’s haunting description of the Santa Anas “that curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends up in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

Shutters fly open. Fences go down. Our oak trees are trimmed by the gusts that blast through them. Dead branches litter our driveway. We clear them away. More fall. I duck through the debris and into the house and mute the wind’s calamity. Outside it howls. Inside it hums.

Ernie sits by a window watching a leaf dance in an ambient breeze. His gaze follows it from a tree as it arcs across our deck and settles on the boards. He begins to turn away. The leaf moves again. Wind carries it upward. The cat lifts his head and watches it soar toward the window. He reaches out but hesitates, a single paw held in midair, as the leaf spins suddenly and blows out of sight.

There’s more to come, another forecaster says, as the hour reaches noon. Fire and smoke. Battered traffic. Scenes from the street, walkers and runners lured out by the new weather. A woman holds her hairdo. A child opens his mouth, tasting the distance. A dog dashes through the blowing debris.

I turn down television’s sound and listen. I think I hear sirens. I step outside to listen more intently. Nothing. Only the wind, whispering now, its ferocity abated. I wonder aloud what Borland meant. How does one touch the secret heart of the wind?

That night, the air is suddenly and mysteriously still, leaving a memory of its wild visit among the debris that shadows its wake. Cooler weather to come, Dallas Raines says. The cat jumps back on a cabinet by the window, a black silhouette. He stares out, wondering. I listen to the silence.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.