When the Hills of Los Angeles Are Burning
A meditation on the magic of the Santa Ana winds and the dangerous spirits they bring.
Welcome to my Substack #27. Soundtrack for this post: I Love L.A.
1. How do you explain the romance of the Santa Ana winds to someone who did not grow up here in Los Angeles? They are violent, and hot, and make you feel flushed. Debris in your eyes so it makes you cry. Hair a mess, and with the force to be able to throw your car aside while driving on THE 60. How is this romantic, one might think? It’s the unpredictability. It’s the high energy. It feels electric and otherworldly. Interplanetary, interdimensional even. Dangerous.
2. I closed my eyes tight as I landed at midnight last Monday. I was sleeping but was jarred awake by the rough turbulent air over Southern California. “The winds are here,” I thought groggily to myself. I had been so worried about my transcontinental flight from Boston to Los Angeles being delayed because of the ice storm, I didn’t think about the firestorm that was waiting for me back home. I closed my eyes tighter pretending to myself to sleep and deeper into my cozy jacket as the plane bounced around – I didn’t want to be awake for this.
3. My parents’ ranch suburban home (Home-Home) would lose shingles after every windstorm. The black shingle would go flying off onto the grass and it sounded like Thor was ripping it out loudly with all his fingernail force. After the winds died down, my dad would take the ladder and climb onto the roof and hammer them back in place, one at a time. The thud thud thud of my dad on the roof was a familiar sound after the wind had cleared a bright blue sky and all the yellow smog and had been swept out to the ocean. He even got shingles from FEMA one year, but of course he didn’t hire anyone to put them in. They sat in a pile in the backyard and he would go on the roof and nail them in as he saw fit. He fancied himself a DIY handy man, and he had the can-do nature of a man that goes to Home Depot on the weekends for fun but never read a book, watched a YouTube, or took a class on how to be a handy man. This meant it was the same shingles, and then some, that would fly off and he’d have to go up and replace them year-round. It took him years of working at Home Depot, before he finally found a guy (probably at work) to redo the roof completely. When the wind blows now, the only sound is air whistling through the guava trees.
4. Home-Home sits in the valley directly at the foot of Mount Baldy. We were the first houses in the neighborhood, and we had dairy farms or strawberry fields just a block away from the house. This meant that when it would rain, and now sometimes, though more faintly, the stench of cow manure was particularly putrid. Now the dairy and chicken farms are four blocks away, and when the Santa Ana wind rolls through, it is all just dust – dust from the farms, dust from the desert, dust from the mountains. The dust finds it’s way into the crevices of the house, layering everything with a layer of silt. While Los Angeles was burning, I drove through the farmland and newly built gated communities for a breath of fresh air. Sand dunes piled on the side of the road. There are no trees to burn here, but the winds tunnel fierce here with nothing to hold them back.
5. Brown and dry palm tree fronds scattered across the black street. Waiting for the prickly tumbleweed to roll by in front of your car. Piles of sand inside the door of the car. All the fruit falling till the wind cleans the trees bare.
6. I can’t stop listening to “Los Angeles is Burning” by Bad Religion. “Somewhere high in the desert/ near a curtain of a blue/ Saint Ann's skirts are billowing / But down here in the city of limelights / The fans of Santa Ana are withering / Palm trees are candles in the murder wind / So many lives are on the breeze / Even the stars are ill at ease/ And Los Angeles is burning.”
7. Did you know the Santa Ana winds don’t actually come from Santa Ana? They come from the northeast, from the Mojave Desert, and the air flows off shore through the Santa Ana Canyon on its way out. What a misnomer.
8. A few years back, I went into my acupuncturist’s craftsman backhouse turned studio. I was going regularly to release the energy in my body and the tears buried in my sternum. She dimmed the lights and put needles in me and stepped outside the room. I listened to the Santa Ana winds rustle grow loudly, exponentially, and reflected on how risky it felt to be stuck with needles when the wind howled around. The winds had arrived earlier than the news had predicted. The air felt alive and my body vulnerable. I asked her to cup me when she got back into the room. I loved cupping. Wearing the bruises on my back felt like a wellness tattoo – I could see the toxins being released from my body through my skin. I laid forward flat, with my back naked as the acupuncturist lit a match under the glass cup and placed it on my back, vacuuming out the air, my skin bulbous underneath. As she turned away after placing the cup on my right shoulder blade, I felt a slow sting. I glanced over my shoulder and saw my skin ablaze. I screamed that I was burning. She quickly came over and put out the flame. She was stunned – she kept repeating how it was impossible – there was nothing flammable on the glass to catch on fire. It was dry, they were cleaned. Luckily, it didn’t burn too deeply. I was left with a circle singed into my back that took a couple years to fade away. “I knew I shouldn’t have done this when the Santa Ana winds were blowing,” she said. And we both lamented what kind of spirits lurked in the Santa Ana winds.
9. You are supposed to cleanse yourself, especially when you go to the desert, with the smoke of bukhour incense when you get home. Jinns linger in the desert and you don’t accidentally want to bring any of them home with you. But with the Santa Ana winds blowing in from the desert, there’s no telling what flies through.
10. It was the Muslim-psychic who told me to be particularly wary of desert jinns, especially since I was going to the desert for writing retreats. I asked her about the time the toaster oven caught fire when I tried to toast a taco shell (never toast a taco shell!) on Christmas Day in Landers, and she said it was probably a desert jinn, though nothing serious. I used the extinguisher on the toaster, but not before the Christmas garland in the kitchen melted. I then asked her about the circle scar on my back. That I was positive it was a Jinn and did it attach? She looks at me and zones out and then starts laughing maniacally. I just stared, stunned. “It must look strange, to see me laugh like this,” she said. “I see it whirling in a circle, like a dervish, on your back. But don’t worry, it’s gone. It just came through because of the wind.”
11. I wonder what kind of jinns came from the Mojave Desert, and how they whirled like dervishes over the mountains to burn down the city of Los Angeles.
12. At the beginning of this year for my first night in Boston, I slept in the guest room in the basement. I was the first guest in my friends’ new home, and the guest room guinea pig. I was wary to sleep in a windowless room but I made sure the door to the upstairs was open and a nightlight was on. All through the night I heard the creak of the furnace, which I swore sounded like a door creaking open and closing. The sounds escalated. A couple of times, I heard whispering at the top of the stairs. When I turned on the bedside light, all the sounds suddenly stopped. I screamed out “Shush! I’m sleeping!” and buried my head under a pillow. That morning I asked my friend if he had done a cleanse of their house, especially since he had been reading outloud a book about jinns in the recording studio in the basement. He hadn’t. That day we went to Salem, Massachusetts to buy witchy supplies and that night, we opened the windows wide to the below freezing temperature outside and went room to room lighting bookhur incense, smoking every corner of the house and playing Surah Al Baqarah on YouTube. And I did not sleep in the basement again.
13. Did you know to distract a jinn, you are supposed to place piles of coins in the corners of the room? It’s to keep them busy as they count the coins. What kind of coin piles should we have kept in Los Angeles to have kept them busy? Our stadium is been renamed Crypto.com, after all.
14. I’ve been avoiding writing here about the trauma. The trauma of houses, neighborhoods, cities burning down - the trauma bond we all share by watching these videos streamed on our television for the past week. We all watched how people hosed down their homes and newscasters stood too close to flames. We all mapped our friends’ homes on the Watch Duty app. We all sent the texts to everyone we thought needed a text. The GoFundMe links being In Los Angeles, we all know someone, some peoples, who were affected by the fires. Pasadena and Alta Dena is where all of our BIPOC folks moved out to once they started having kids and buying homes. It’s where the older activists of Los Angeles called home. It’s multigenerational homes and working-class families. I was supposed to read radical Desi poems at the Alta Dena library in two weeks. But I don’t need to tell you about any of this fire trauma – you see it the way I do. You see how fucked up the post-fire political analysis is, the way I do. We are all livestreaming this disaster together.
15. At my dad’s house, I don’t have a go bag prepped. I keep making earthquake kits for that house which he periodically takes apart because he has to use the Tupperware box for some other container of items, he deems more important than survival. Usually junk he’s bought at a garage sale. I don’t quite understand how we became a family of so much stuff – we spent every year of my childhood moving to a different home, and we were able to live out of two suitcases each for most of my childhood life. Now my items live across two homes, my apartment in Los Angeles and Home-Home in my room. As I watch on television people pack up their house to evacuate, I wonder what I should evacuate with as well. Passports, official documents, jewelry. But what of my dead mother’s belonging do I keep? The black and white photos carefully saved from when they escaped Lahore to Dhaka with all she could carry on her back? Her broken gold chain and her teenaged stamp collection? The thosbees she prayed with? If I wasn’t at my Dad’s house, would my family know where to look for these items that I saved so preciously or would they think of these items not as precious as their own belongings? I think I can survive with only my passport, my digital writings, my backed-up photos, and my art - but can I survive without the last remnants of objects that my mother once touched and I preciously saved?
16. I saw a picture on Instagram of a charred paged of the Quran, sitting in the grass. I texted Muslims who might know someone at Al-Taqwa Mosque that had recently burnt down. I’m sure there must be more paper ephemera like this. Is it insensitive to ask for one’s ashes? I just want to save them and turn them into treasures.
17. I am reminded of triptych paintings of palms trees on fire at the Cheech Museum by Perry Vasquez.
18. How do you paint something as ephemeral and invisible as the Santa Ana winds?
19. I came back to my Koreatown apartment a couple of days ago and under a fine layer of soot. The air purifier has been running non-stop. Everyone in Los Angeles is wearing a mask outside, again. The fancy ones, that hold tight to your skin. The AQI is down, but the toxins are high. The sidewalks in my neighborhood are empty, people staying in instead of going outside. I’m drinking bottled water only now, too hesitant to trust my Brita to filter properly. The skies are finally blue and the wind is finally still. But everyone here feels shaken. Everyone has given to every single friends’ Go Fund Me and donated to mutual aid.
20. I am placing piles of coins in the corners of this city and praying that it will be enough.
so beautiful