When the Fire Comes

As the fires in Los Angeles continue to multiply, the closing sentences of Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Ana” have begun to pop up in news stories and on social media. “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” Didion wrote in 1967, especially the hot, dry wind known as the Santa Ana, which blows across the city from the desert to the ocean, bringing fires in its wake. The Santa Ana winds “affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability,” Didion wrote. “The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”