Southern California Fires
The fires are raging in Southern California, the epicenter for most disasters. When living there one only had to wait a short time before another one rounded the corner. The seasons changed, not from the weather (sunny and 72) but from catastrophe. Fire, flood, drought, earthquake, wind, smog; They all waited for their turn in line to be unleashed upon the City of Angels and the surrounding metropolitan areas.
The Santa Ana Winds are indigenous to "the Southland." A dry, hot blow from the inland deserts, weird things tend to happen, whether on a personal or regional level. Every Southern California seems to have some memory or story from a time when the Santa Ana Winds washed through, wreaking havoc and somehow altering personal existence, if only for a moment but yet etched into memory.
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas 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. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge." - "Red Wind" (short story, 1938), published in Trouble Is My Business (1939.) From Wikiquote.
Writers, like the noir-champion Chandler (who said it well) and Joan Didion, have used the atmospheric condition as the scenario around which to create literature. But now it is alive and the people are feeling its burn personally, like the touch of the page on the mind but more like a maelstrom that seeps into the lungs and singes every hair on the body.
It is a tough time to be in Southern California. But the fearless photojournalists of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, San Diego Union-Tribune and others are putting themselves on the frontlines with the first responders to make searing images of the destruction upon both the physical and the mental. The Material and the human.
This is the time when newspapers are at their most important. Providing immediate and intimate coverage to the readers — print and online — going places where the public cannot go and feeding the incessant need for information. Why newspapers? No one, except maybe some of the news magazines, can do a better job with full scope than the newspaper photojournalists familiar with the territory.
