Perfect Weather

For years now we have kept getting reports from California of catastrophic fires that not only burn up the brush and what trees there are over wide areas, but also take with them numerous  dwellings,  including some belonging to the rich.   There was an outbreak just recently in the Santa Barbara area, on the coast about halfway between LA and SF, and now -- unless it's the same one -- another conflagration going on just north of there, bearing the very cool name of the "Jesusita Fire."

Though I can't at all say that I am familiar with the Santa Barbara area, and I never went to the town itself, for a little over a year I was stationed nearby, at a tiny air base that is probably no longer there, outside a tiny town called Camarillo, which in turn is near larger Oxnard, which in turn is on or close to the lip of the very large Pacific Ocean and gets to listen to its constant, reassuring whispers.

This was in 1953 and into '54, and the weather there was highly noticeable to me, because there was none.  I like to tell people how the whole time I was there it never rained one drop or even showed one cloud, and the temp stayed forever somewhere in the lower 80's F.

This is very disturbing and even immoral to a born weather nut.

 It was like the life in one of those wacky Indian romance movies, about upper class people and in which everything (in deeply messed-up, godforsaken India  no less!)  is always peaches and cream, and everybody goes around beaming and singing and playing games on each other, and the  tunes of endless joy rarely pause for breath.

--Correction.   I was told that one morning  while I was present it did "rain" there  at Camarillo -- about 0.00015 of an inch,  though I can't vouch for that because it was  at about 4:30 in the morning, while I was asleep.

In short, the weather there was always perfect -- and I was glad to get out of it, when the U.S. Air Force in its infinite wisdom and quirks chose to require my presence next at a much more interesting place, the distant island of Okinawa, where there were the kinds of  weather extremes that, being an  East Coaster, I loved, and in abundance, from  sweltering heat that was tough even for someone used to summers in the Nation's Capital  to epic typhoons with their millions of  tons of hard-driven, battering water.

And now today in Santa Barbara and over most of beautiful California the weather is perfect, too, for fires.  For the last three years at least they've had bad droughts,  and everything is dry, which doesn't surprise me.  Even when I was around,  the vegetation there seemed badly in need.  All the greens looked pale and washed out, compared to the deep, saturated, healthy chlorophyls of the East.

And the expectations  in California  are for more fires, and still more, far into the foreseeable future, as all the burning sends up more carbon dioxide to add to what humans are contributing to the greenhouse effect, creating a hotter and hotter climate just right for blazes across the real estate..

People there are looking at things mainly from the point of view of the large number of houses being destroyed.   That is indeed a terrible thing.   We are told that a person can always find another house.  I am not so sure about that.  And then there's the self-feeding effect of the heat and the fires.  The sense of helplessness in the face of that is almost impossible to contemplate.