Lethal Dose

The Santa Anas rattle you. Like a big hand reaches inside to the top of your spine and picks you up and shakes your bones. At first, you don’t know what it is that’s eating you. You don’t feel … right. You can’t sleep. Restless. Skin itches. Your hair is sticking up. Out, under the joshua trees, picking up bleached animal bones while the wind dries up your skin so that when you look down your hands look like a grandmother’s. You can pile on more clothes but they can’t stop that restless wind that makes food unappetizing, that makes you drive for no reason to nowhere, only to come back again, to try and lay in your hammock only to be swung violently. The dog runs wild, in circles, around and around and around the ranch. Then he collapses, barely able to move. Driving out to the desert there was a big, bad accident on the other side of the freeway. Three firetrucks and a firemen standing in the freeway alongside ambulances. The winds take that fresh blood smell and whip it up into the air, into the San Gorgonios. It follows you as you rock side to side, up through the Colorado into the Mojave desert. The stars have never looked so clear; the wind whips all the layers out from the sky so they burn bright, little heater holes in the sky. You pile on blankets but it’s not doing the trick, you can’t get that wind from creeping in under your blanket.

You don’t realize it at the time. It’s later, after you’ve fled, trying to go somewhere else to rest your rattled bones, that feel like they’re strung together with wire. You see the sign for the Santa Ana Freeway and you remember it’s October and then you think, yep. That’s it. You remember when you first moved here and complaining of being antsy and your coworker smiles knowingly, “The Santa Anas.” You don’t believe winds can do things but you remember your Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind”:

Those hot dry winds 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.

It’s heated and compressed and it blows over the Mojave at hurricane speed and that’s where I’m hunkered down. It does weird things; your goosebumps on your arms and lower legs seem to be permanent and your skin can’t drink enough moisture. Anxiety. Restlessness. You can’t read or listen to anything for more than a few minutes. And you don’t know why. If you read about it there’s words like “hot,” “compression,” “pressure,” “bearing down,” “hurricane speed.”

Joan Didion: “a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. … To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

I don’t know about the mechanistic behavior, but I know about the feeling that an ill wind reached into my shirt and grabbed my bones and shook them hard, hard enough to make them settle not-quite-back-together again, yet. The Santa Anas are the Santanas - the Spanish vientos de Sanatanas (”winds of Satan”, Sanatanas being a rarer form of Satanás), the devil winds.

Ezekiel had a little vision out in the Valley of the Dry Bones:

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them. 9. Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”