Right here we’re, in the course of August in Los Angeles, and I’m right here to say: That is terrible.
You already knew that should you reside within the valleys or actually wherever north or east of downtown L.A. These of us who do, effectively … we see these August forecast highs of, say, 86 levels for “Los Angeles” (as if town’s 469 sq. miles exclude Van Nuys or Woodland Hills), reflexively tack on 10 or 15 levels and quietly cope with our dread.
To these of you who dwell in areas cooled by the Pacific Ocean’s breezes, do that: Drive just a few miles inland, say “August” and see what occurs. Utter it audibly, and somebody inside earshot would possibly bleat, “Ugh.” Say it in your head after spending the afternoon right here, and it’ll be you who mutters in disgust.
August in L.A. doesn’t get the scorn it deserves. Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion familiarized everybody east of the Mississippi River with the Santa Ana winds, a lot that their undeserved mystique has lent itself to at the least one cringe-worthy rom-com scene, one enjoyable TV musical quantity and infinite literary doomsaying. And Mike Davis wrote the (precise) ebook on excessive climate in Southern California.
However whereas these occasions usually spawn wildfires, floods and different calamities, they’re discrete phenomena that typically puncture in any other case nice occasions. When the nice and cozy winds die down and the storms subside, we return to our commonly scheduled October-June perfection (offered an influence line doesn’t fail and mild the San Gabriel Mountains on hearth).
Not so with August, which guarantees dread for 31 days. Even the phrase, starting and ending with comparable vowel qualities, evinces monotony.
In July, with its June gloom leftovers, you would possibly say, “Hey, summer season isn’t so dangerous.” However when August arrives and the fact of interminable day-and-night warmth hits, it’s, “We’re actually doing this.”
Say somebody affords you a free ticket to Disneyland or a day sport at Dodger Stadium in July or September. Nice, however verify the forecast first. However Disneyland or Dodger Stadium below the August solar? Loss of life march.
Maybe I’m biased. Vin Scully died on Aug. 2, 2022. A yr later to the day, my mother died. As a baby rising up in Glendale, I vividly recall the Verdugo Mountains hiding for a lot of August behind a curtain of smog, as if so as to add a suffocating, claustrophobic high quality to the specter of warmth stroke.
Talking of my mother — who dreaded summer season warmth in all probability greater than anybody else — she as soon as likened August to the ultimate weeks of being pregnant. An OB-GYN nurse at Los Angeles Common Medical Middle (which to me will at all times be “County Hospital”), she etched a silver lining across the unceasing discomfort and occasional problems of the ninth month: It could be the physique’s method of constructing an individual much less scared of childbirth.
So it was with August and for youths about to renew college, she as soon as instructed me: The ultimate full month of summer season, on common the most well liked in L.A., had a method of constructing kids sit up for the promise of cooler days in September, when college started.
Now, we’ve ruined even that, by shifting the beginning of faculty ever earlier into the worst month of the yr. Earlier than school, I by no means began class earlier than Labor Day — however on Tuesday, not even midway into August, my kids will start their cruelly named “fall” time period within the Alhambra Unified College District. L.A. Unified children will return even earlier, on Monday.
Channeling my mother, maybe there’s a far-off silver lining to this: With rising generations being plunked again into the classroom on the hottest time of yr, the dearth of literary wailing over August in L.A. might finish. In spite of everything, once they’re scribbling their first writing assignments of the yr and on the lookout for inspiration, they could discover it of their poorly air conditioned school rooms or on scorching asphalt playgrounds unshaded from the August solar. The following era of Chandlers and Didions will detest this time of yr.
