When I first came across Joan Didion’s essay The Santa Anas (1969), something lit up inside me. I have my own memories. It wasn’t so so similar than her experience, wherein people were anxious and even hostile when the winds changed. In my childhood days, the Santa Ana winds arrived not on a schedule, but with an eerie predictability, curling into our Orange County neighborhood just as September bled into October, and lingering well into spring.
25 years after Didion had published her essay– in the early 1990s– as my students now call it, the late 1900s– Southern California. Our street was lined with one-story brick houses topped with gable roofs, stubbornly pitched despite the absence of snow. The homes stood shoulder to shoulder, but the backyards sprawled wide enough to cradle family-size pools, inflatable or in-ground, depending on your luck. The trees were always slightly out of place—imported, thirsty, and forever straining toward a climate that hadn’t asked for them.
The airport during the Santa Anas is a place of false clarity, where everything is visible and nothing feels secure. The wind arrives not as breeze but as verdict—dry, electric, mean. It lifts the grit from the surrounding basin and sends it spiraling across the tarmac, where it settles on windows, in the folds of luggage, in the mouths of those who forget to keep them shut.
Inside, the glass walls tremble in their frames. The air conditioning hums with the fatigue of long resistance, never quite managing to drown out the low howl just beyond the doors. People sit in molded chairs with their coats in their laps, watching the monitors flicker with delays and revised gates. Somewhere, a child cries. No one looks up. There is a peculiar stillness to the movement—gates open, people board, announcements are made—but all of it feels untethered, as if the planes might lift without instruction, as if the whole place might shake loose from its foundations and drift toward the desert.
It is the kind of day that reminds you that control is mostly illusion, that the sky doesn’t have to be dark to be dangerous.
The dry winds once swept in from the hills behind our house in Newport Beach, carrying with them the scent of sunbaked grass and the unmistakable musk of livestock. In those days, cows roamed freely across the brittle terrain, their slow movements part of the background rhythm of late-summer afternoons. The hills were raw, open, and uncontained—land that seemed to belong more to the weather than to people.
There’s a golf course on top of it now. Pelican Hill’s manicured greens have replaced the dry chaparral, the smell of manure traded for chlorinated ponds and fresh-cut turf. The winds still come, but they arrive tamed, filtered through irrigation systems and clubhouse fences, no longer wild enough to sting your eyes, irritate your nose, or dry your throat.
The winds came down hard from the mountains, dry and deliberate, the kind of wind that doesn’t so much blow as peel something back. In Newport Beach, at The Wedge, where the coastline curls like a muscle under tension, surfers watch the horizon with a kind of reverence and suspicion. Offshore winds can bless the water—hold the wave faces steady, iron the surface to a glassy sheen—but it’s a fragile bargain. The same wind that gives form also takes. When the Santa Anas pick up, too fast, too sharp, paddling becomes a battle. The waves turn mean, the sea restless, and suddenly the promise of perfect surf collapses into something wild, uncooperative. It’s always like that here. Beauty balanced on the edge of undoing.
Back then, my father’s garden was less a patch of soil and more a quiet rebellion. In a suburban Orange County backyard, hemmed in by stucco walls and concrete patios, he conjured a microclimate of his own—a tropical sprawl of guavas, persimmons, dragonfruit, papaya, passion fruit, avocado, sugar apples, grapes, and lemons. Between the fruit trees, he carved out a rectangular bed where basil, cilantro and mint grew in neat rows, their scent rising with the heat. These were not California natives. The garden had nothing to do with drought-resistant landscaping or seasonal planting guides. It had everything to do with memory, with Vietnam, with taste.
Keeping the tropical garden alive took water. Gallons of it. He would drag out the hose, place it at the base of a guava tree, and let it run for half an hour while he inspected the leaves or swatted at a fly. Water waste wasn’t a concern, not then. Not for him. The garden mattered more than municipal warnings or parched reservoirs. It was sustenance and ceremony—a way to preserve the flavors of his childhood.
He loathed the Santa Ana winds. They tore through his garden like a thief, coating the fruit in a fine dust and drying the herbs into brittle curls. Every time they came through town, he would have to fan the dust away with a banana leaf conical hat. It was light but strong enough to rid the dust without blowing over herbs like mint, cilantro, and Thai basil. Eventually, he created a makeshift shelter for the garden out of heavy blue tarps. Like so much else in California, the winds refused to accommodate the delicate ecosystem he had tried to build.
It wasn’t just the trees in my father’s garden it wreaked havoc on. No, the wind did not give a fuck. Down by the beach, the palms bowed low, their spines too proud to bend until they didn’t—until they cracked like matchsticks and collapsed across PCH.
The earth sometimes gave off a strange smell—dry dust and metal. The hills behind our house were still raw, and the winds would rake through them, lifting grit into the sky and dropping it, like a fine coat of ash, over the elementary school playground. We’d squint through recess, dodging the sharp sting of airborne sand. We could taste the dust in the back of our throats when we inhaled the dry wind. There were times when the gust swooped in so strongly, we could spread our arms and legs like a starfish and it would nudge us an inch or two forward. We’re not that small anymore. Sometimes the wind carried the smell of cow manure—thick, sour, inescapable—wafting down from the remnants of farmland bordering our world. That smell, too, is gone.
When it was time to walk home from school, I’d trek through the dust, breathing in the dry air. My brother always got nosebleeds, but I was lucky I never did. When we finally got to our door, a quick walk around the corner from the school, we were tan and dusty from head to toe, from our heads to our feet. It covered our backpacks, and when we got home, we had to empty our backpacks, slamming the textbooks and trapper keepers on the floor before taking the backpacks outside to shake the dust off.
No one walks home from school anymore. The roads have become rivers of Teslas and Range Rovers, navigated by stay-at-home moms and nannies.
Maybe the winds haven’t changed, but everything else has. Back then, the Santa Anas swept through open fields and citrus groves, carrying with them the sunbaked scent of sea water, dry grass, and something harder to name—maybe dust from the hills, or the hot shimmer of asphalt after recess. The air had weight, grit, memory.
Now, the same winds whip through a different landscape—mansions where orchards once stood, drought-tolerant plants in place of thirsty guava trees, stucco walls instead of open yards.
The Santa Anas still blow. If you listen closely, you can hear them swoop in from the Inland Empire. But you can no longer feel them rattle the windows, and they no longer rearrange the patio furniture or fog up our windows with dust. As an adult, I wasn’t the only thing that changed. I never thought I’d miss the smell of dust and cow dung. The new mansions and the mini skyscrapers have disrupted the currents, interrupting the wind’s once-commanding path. The cows are gone, too. The natural world doesn’t disappear—it adapts slowly… quietly, just like we do.
Author’s Note: As of May 2025, Santa Ana Winds season has not yet arrived. In 2024, I felt nothing. It was nothing like the 90s. Nothing like my childhood.
