Sunday, August 30, 2009

Meteorological Histrionics: Storms that Changed the Landscape in my Mind

Looks like a dag-blame essay series comin’ in.  Better lay in some supplies.  Chuckles has been known to make this stuff really last. 

There’s something about a good storm that really makes an impression on me.  I mean, I remember lots of storms.  Some were serious, and some were ridiculous. It’s one thing for the rain to fall for three days straight and the dry wash to overflow its cavernous banks; it’s something else entirely to experience conditions that become, effectively, a personal iconography, a vocabulary of images illustrating my own personal mythology.  Concepts like “deluge” and “maelstrom” and “end of days” have appropriated specific historical embodiments out of my own experiences, though of these there are not too many.  Sitting here now today, I can only think of five storms that really hit me where I live in that visceral way.  But for a personal mythological iconography, that’s probably not a bad start. 

A word first deserves to be said about the storms of my childhood.  It has been said that it never rains in southern California, and I can’t speak for how things are there as of this writing, but when I was growing up it sometimes rained in SoCal and sometimes it rained like a sonofabitch.  I’ve seen your midwestern summer downpours and your east coast drenchers and even a tropical South Florida storm.  I know real rain when I see it, and sometimes, as a lad, I sure enough saw it.  Thick, heavy drops that changed the way light and sound worked, a sensible reduction in the amount of air in the air, and this would go on, more or less, for three or four days of non-stop cloudbursts.  Kelly was flabbergasted when a serious storm hit L.A. not long after she’d first moved there from PA.  “Don’t these damn things ever stop?,” she asked (or words to that effect) and we just laughed and laughed because really, that would be commercial suicide for a place like L.A. never to have sunlight ever again.  It just feels like that sometimes, but then the rain does stop and everything is clean and clear and renewed, just ripe for the taking. 

That’s a powerful feeling, one of my favorites, but that’s all beside the point I’m making here.  These words are about particular storms, not some generic memory of rain.  Maybe there were some I should have remembered in particular, but I just don’t.  My typical non-specific childhood storm was one where I’d go out in yellow slickers with buckle-latch closures, to float foil boats down fastrunning gutterstreams in rain-dimmed murk.  Generic rainy playtime.  No special storm.  Doesn’t count.  As if I’d have let that stop me.  Which I obviously didn’t.  So, moving on:

1.  San Fernando Valley, mid-70s: Or maybe this was a little later, but not much.  I’m pretty sure it’s referenced in the novel White Oleander, a rain of ashes that filled the sky with the convective power of massive wildfires, huge ones up in the San Gabriels or Santa Suzannas or something, lots of timber ablaze, forests incinerated so utterly and instantly that its remnants came floating down to us in perfect replication, twigs and leaves, all rendered down to the tiniest detail in light-grey ash you could catch on a fingertip and crush with the slightest touch.... It swirled around on the pavement, covered lawns, piled into drifts like flash-fried snow.  It was a strange storm - warm weather, no water.  But ash was raining down from the sky; we couldn’t go out to play, and the air was thick with dead matter that stank as it wafted over us from a hell a hundred miles distant.  It was a storm unlike any other I’ve ever been in and I hope never to repeat it.  Once was enough on that one.  Post-apocalyptic, man. 

Up next: more storms, baby....

public sculpture; across from the Ferry Bldg: welcome to san fran

another cell-phone special