The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Read online

  Gershunov coauthored a paper published last month in Geophysical Research Letters about what he calls “the longest and probably most detailed record of Santa Ana winds available”—from 1948 to 2012. (The lead author was Janin Guzman-Morales, also of Scripps.)

  The record reveals patterns in the wind’s behavior. They follow “a well-defined diurnal cycle,” says the paper, where they’re strongest in the morning “and decay to their minimum in the late afternoon.” They’re more common in El Niño years, when storms off California drop the pressure way low on the coast. They blow most often in December, which is predictable, “because that’s when you have the coldest air masses, the longest nights in the High Desert . . . The longest nights and the weakest solar radiation.” But some of the strongest winds have blown in the early fall.

  That’s bad news. In early fall, hillside plants have had all summer to dry out; the Santa Anas suck out any last moisture, and then all it takes is a poorly stamped-out cigarette butt and the hills are on fire, flames fanned by more Santa Anas. Santa Ana fires burn harder, hotter, bigger, faster, and more often than other LA fires, and they burn closer to the city.

  Or maybe Los Angeles is lucky and there is no fire on this particular Santa Ana day, but trees are uprooted, power’s lost, you wake up to a sickly yellow-pink sky and the dog skidding in frantic circles on the hardwood and the escalating feeling you’ve forgotten something annoying but important.

  Can we blame the winds? Raymond Chandler isn’t the only one who holds the Santa Anas responsible for bad behavior—they’re said to cause migraines, irritability, even suicides and murders.

  In the 19th century the winds were thought to be cleansing—an 1886 report from the California State Board of Health called them “health-giving” and informed Californians that after a bout of Santa Ana, “the atmosphere becomes wonderfully clear, pure, and invigorating.”

  That report also noted an improbable-sounding electricity in the Santa Ana air:

  During the progress of this wind the air is highly electrified. Horses’ tails stand out like thick brushes, the hair of the head crackles sharply when rubbed with the hand, and metallic bodies resting on an insulating material, such as dry wood, discharge themselves with visible sparks when a conductor is brought near. In one instance, it is said, the telegraph line between Los Angeles and Tucson, some four hundred and fifty miles in length, was detached from the battery and operated by the earth currents alone.

  A man who wrote to the LA Times in 1893 to complain about the name of the Santa Anas still had to acknowledge that “it is generally admitted that the winds are beneficial to health, purifying the atmosphere and destroying germs of disease.”

  But nothing that powerful could possibly be good. By the 1960s the Santa Anas had developed a reputation bad enough to attract a small amount of academic interest—in 1968 a geologist named Willis Miller published his findings that on about two-thirds of Santa Ana days, the homicide count in LA was above average. It’s not terribly convincing data, and since then only journalists seem to have looked into the connection. In 2008, Los Angeles magazine tallied up a 22 percent increase in domestic abuse reports made to the LAPD during a string of Santa Ana days, and a 30 percent increase in reports to the Santa Ana PD.

  Didion wrote that the wind’s effects force us to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior. So then what is the mechanism?

  The Santa Anas are more or less a type of foehn, an ill wind that blows hot and dry down a mountainside, like the chinook in the far northwest of North America, the khamsin in North Africa, the zonda in the Andes. These hot winds might just be able to blow an electron off an air molecule, creating a precarious but possibly mischievous positive ion.

  In the 1950s a bacteriologist named Albert Krueger found that positive ions in the air could drive up the serotonin levels in a mouse’s blood and drive it down in the mouse’s brain. Serotonin can influence mood, migraines, breathing, and nausea. In 1974 a pharmacologist named Felix Sulman found high serotonin levels in the urine of Israelis who were sensitive to the sharav winds, and prescribed a strong dose of negative ions as the cure.

  In 1981 social psychologists Jonathan Charry and Frank B. W. Hawkinshire published research suggesting that

  mood changes . . . were present for most [subjects] when exposed to positive ions, [but] assessment of individual differences in susceptibility was essential for detecting effects on performance and physiological activation. For most [subjects], mood changes induced by ion exposure were characterized by increased tension and irritability.

  They also found that when “ion-sensitive” subjects were exposed to positive ions, their skin became less conductive (this is a common psychological gauge) and their reaction times increased.

  And in 2000 a group of neurologists published a study that found some migraineurs were more likely to get migraines on days before the chinook blew or on especially windy chinook days. But only two of their subjects got migraines on both types of days, and most got none at all.

  So if you’ve gotten high off ions, get ready for the comedown: a 2013 meta-analysis of ion/mood studies carried out between 1957 and 2012 found “no consistent influence of positive or negative air ionization on anxiety, mood, relaxation, sleep, and personal comfort measures.” (It did conclude that negative ions might be able to reduce depression.)

  The meek little wife Chandler evokes is a convenient lie. She’s just a psychopath or has snorted too much cocaine. That anxious feeling is really a hangover we don’t want to admit to ourselves, and who ever knows why the dog does what he does. The science doesn’t make a difference; Chandler and Didion and the rest of us just notice late in the afternoon when the air is staticky dry and hot that all day we’ve been getting the sense that something just beyond our reach has gone sour. It’s not the ions. It’s just the wind.

  No one is too eager to tell the truth about the Santa Anas, least of all the Santa Anans of Orange County, whose city is miles away from the Santa Ana Canyon the winds are named for.

  Santa Ana fires have burned pretty regularly from at least as far back as 1425, but no one seems to have asked or documented what the Tongva or Chumash called the winds. The earliest Anglos didn’t have a name—in a 1943 article in California Folklore Quarterly, Terry Stephenson cites Dana Point namesake Richard Henry Dana’s recollection of “a violent northeaster” in 1836.

  By the end of that century, though, they were the Santa Ana winds. That 1886 California State Board of Health report says the Santa Ana got its name “because it frequently issues from the Santa Ana pass.” An angry Santa Anan wrote to the LA Times in 1893 that the winds “take the name of Santa Ana by reason of their passage through the Santa Ana mountain cañon” (which was a “gross injustice to Santa Ana and Orange county”). In 1912 the LA Times said that “early settlers in this part of Southern California gave the wind its name, because it was alleged to gain access to the region through the Santa Ana Canyon.” The 1930s WPA guide for the region says the canyon “gave its name to the hot dry Santa Ana winds that occasionally sweep the southern California coastal counties.”

  Once he has made clear that “old-timers . . . have always known that the wind got its name because it swept out of the mouth of the Santa Ana canyon,” Stephenson documents all the lies about how the winds got their name—a general named Santa Anna was known for his dust-kicking cavalry, there was a notable wind on St. Ann’s day (in July!) during the Spanish era, and the one that has stuck:

  The idea was that everybody was mistaken about the name of the wind. It should be called a Santana, which, the Chamber of Commerce was told, was an Indian name for a desert wind . . . Nobody has ever named the tribe that was supposed to have used the name, and nobody has any story as to how away back yonder in the ’70’s settlers in the Santa Ana Valley managed ingloriously to twist the name into Santa Ana.

  By 1967 this story had twisted into this story, in the LA Times:

  Others said the Spanish padres transla
ted the Indian term for devil wind into “viente satanas” (wind of Satan).

  Satanas and Santana had been corrupted into Santa Ana, they said.

  Santana was and still is widely believed to be the true name of the winds which originated with the Indians.

  However, a recognized authority on Indian language says no such word as Santana ever existed.

  Like a very boring noir, the Chamber of Commerce seems to be behind so many wrong things we all say about the Santa Ana winds. In 1912 the LA Times reported that they had

  fathered a movement and campaign of education to get rid of the name Santa Ana as attached to the desert wind that pays occasional visits to parts of Southern California. The directors have passed a resolution asking the newspapers to call the wind a norther or a desert wind, anything so long as it be no longer designated as a Santa Ana wind. The public is called upon to refrain from referring to the wind in letters and conversation as a Santa Ana wind.

  Some Orange County businessmen threw a tantrum, and now here we are a century later saying “Devil Winds.” On the other hand, as Stephenson writes, “at Santa Ana and everywhere else the wind was still a Santa Ana.”

  We don’t seem to have changed the winds, but we have accidentally helped to make them more dangerous.

  Global warming is expected to heat the Great Basin faster than the coast, which should mean less cold air and high pressure to fuel the Santa Anas, but so far that hasn’t happened. “There already has been a warming—not as much as we expect in the future—but we don’t see any reduction of Santa Ana winds activity in the long record of Santa Ana winds,” says Gershunov. He says that the strength with which the winds blow in warmer months like September “tells me the intensity of Santa Ana winds is not controlled just by the temperature of the cold air mass over the Great Basin . . . In the global warming context, it seems that the answer is more complicated.”

  Actually Gershunov and his coauthors “didn’t really see any significant changes in wind frequency or anything else” over 65 years of Santa Anas. Except for one thing: “extreme Santa Ana winds seem to be getting more common, at the expense of run-of-the-mill events,” but they don’t think that has anything to do with global warming; it seems to correspond instead to the Great Pacific Climate Shift of the 1970s (which is pretty much what it sounds like, but we’ll talk about it another time).

  “We don’t really understand right now how the Santa Ana winds might change in a warming climate,” but scientists have a much better idea of how precipitation will change: there’s probably going to be a lot less of it in Southern California. Southern California fire season comes in the fall, later than the rest of the western United States, because of the Santa Anas. But parched vegetation is the fuel, and the longer the dry season lasts into winter, the longer vegetation stays parched, the longer the Santa Ana season has to set it all on fire.

  We’ll leave our mark before we’re done here in the basin, but the Santa Anas were blowing long before Los Angeles began and they’ll be blowing long after it’s gone. The city they dishevel today isn’t the same one Chandler and Didion wrote the myths of so many decades ago—here at the beginning of the 21st century we have different priorities and we’re writing new myths. But while we might demolish the freeways and the strip malls, or build towers on every block, the mountains will always rise up in a ring around Los Angeles; the cold, high air will always be pulled down through the canyons, taking on heat, whipping up any palm leaves that are left, unsettling the locals, whatever beasts they may be.

  OMAR MOUALLEM

  Dark Science

  FROM Hazlitt

  Last month I found myself on top of a dark mountain attending a “star party.”

  As much as it sounds like a Beverly Hills soirée or a drug-addled orgy, it is not. This star party is a gathering of a few hundred people at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas to look at the sky. Enormous telescopes were at my disposal, and interpretive astronomers carried high-tech laser pointers that seemingly touched the stars. But otherwise it felt like an ancient ritual.

  Peering through a lens at M38—a star cluster too faint for naked eyes that sparkles like diamonds through telescopes—I overheard a girl behind me ask, “What is that?”

  “The Milky Way,” her mom replied. The girl let out the most awestruck gasp. “See, honey, this is why we get you out of Houston.”

  City kid. Of course.

  Unlike her, I grew up surrounded by countryside, where shortly after sundown anyone could count at least three stars in the sky. By the time Mom tucked me in with stories from the hadith and flicked the lights, the Big Dipper glared at me from outside my window.

  I had a generous view of the universe until leaving for college, which I’d forgotten until October 2014, when I returned for a friend’s wedding. It was a country party. There was a hog roast. And later, stumbling to town drunk, I found myself in the middle of a field staring at a glistening sky. Had I still believed in him, I’d say it looked like God had sneezed glitter.

  The next night I drove home to Edmonton with the aurora borealis by my side. It’d been there all my childhood, but this was the first time I remembered noticing.

  Two weeks after the wedding I was on the road again, to the Rockies for Jasper Dark Sky Festival. This is the ultimate star party, with many times more people than were gathered in Texas. The festival started in 2011, shortly after the 11,300-kilometer-square park was designated the world’s largest dark-sky preserve by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. (Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, which is four times larger, took the record in 2013.)

  The RASC’s designations are based on the work of the International Dark-Sky Association, or IDA, which has lobbied dozens of municipalities to adopt dimmer and glare-resistant street lighting, or get rid of it completely, and ultimately improve our views of the night sky. The IDA is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, but the movement owes much of its success to the RASC for establishing influential light-abatement guidelines and the world’s first preserve, in southern Ontario, in 1999. Parks Canada is a partner in the cause, making picturesque Jasper ideal to host such a festival. Outside the park’s few towns and lone highway, you basically need a flashlight to navigate the night, or, if you’re a hardcore star-watcher, a headlamp with a red bulb that protects your nocturnal vision and only gives as much spotlight as you need to not walk right into a grizzly den.

  There are figurative stars at Jasper Dark Sky too, like Colonel Chris Hadfield. I was eager to meet Canada’s sweetheart, but as I arrived at the media launch my mind was elsewhere: on my phone and how dead it was, and how my charger was out of reach, and whether I could possibly go three hours without it. In other words, I am exactly the kind of phone-addicted, dead-eyed digital native the festival hopes to net with its slogan, “Power Down, Look Up.”

  I pumped the home-screen button a few times, but it wouldn’t resuscitate, so like a piece of my soul, I left it behind and entered a lodge occupied by marketers, journalists, bloggers, and the guests of honor, members of the RASC. There was a crackling fireplace and warm buffet, but soon I was ushered out the back door and into the cold. The blinds were shut behind me. A group huddled outside around Alister Ling, a meteorologist and club member from Edmonton, who had one of those almighty laser pointers. But all it could touch were clouds. The sole reason we had come was out of reach.

  Time to power up. A fellow member gave Ling an iPad. He held it over his head, and aided by a constellations app, GPS, and brute digital force, he stole back the hidden stars. They glowed red; he tapped a feature that connected the red dots and defined them as ancient Greeks did: gods with simple stories and simpler bodies. It was very unimpressive. Eventually he turned it off and told his own stories in a quiet campfire voice.

  Ling reminisced on the last full lunar eclipse, for which he braved frigid weather in a parka, two sleeping bags, and two toques, all to bear witness to a disappearing moon and the purest skylight he’d ever known.
“Suddenly I heard a thumping sound,” he said. Ling mimicked the noise with his teeth and cheeks. “Then I realized that it was blood rushing through my head.”

  That he experienced this alone was a point of equal beauty and sadness. Later he would share with me a statistic oft repeated by dark-sky advocates, that two-thirds of the U.S. population can’t see the Milky Way anymore. “Artificial light robbed us of our heritage of seeing the sky. It’s even worse now.” He imitated texting. “A lot of people don’t look up.”

  Even if we could fix the obstruction of artificial light overnight, Ling doubted most people, especially younger ones, would have the patience to make stargazing a hobby. We crave instant gratification, so we’re far more likely to stare at the light in our hands than the light in the sky.

  It’s absurd to think humans should need a protected area or festival to remind them to gaze upward, something that once came to us as naturally as breathing. Given something to see, though, the hardwired urges kick in. During the 1994 Los Angeles earthquakes and subsequent blackout, a nearby observatory was flooded with calls from Angelenos reporting an ominous bright streak looming above. They wondered if the celestial shape was responsible for whatever shook them awake. It was the Milky Way, of course, but it goes to show how primed we are to seek answers in space.

  Plains Cree people formed a genesis story around a rupture in the sky, not unlike a wormhole, from which they arrived as spirits before transforming into mortal humans. According to aboriginal educator Wilfred Buck, Cree—“the star people,” as Buck calls them—have several names for the Milky Way: meskinow (path), sipi (river), and apchak sipi (spirit river). Like all ancient cultures, his ancestors designated the constellations’ names and mythologies in order to package the cosmos into a tidy tale. They were among the first amateur astronomers, a field that today is one of the few areas of interest wherein amateur isn’t a pejorative but a badge of honor.