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 if you happen to reside within the valleys or actually anyplace north or east of downtown L.A. These of us who do, nicely … we see these August forecast highs of, say, 86 levels for “Los Angeles” (as if the 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 a couple of miles inland, say “August” and see what occurs. Utter it audibly, and somebody inside earshot may 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 no less than one cringe-worthy rom-com scene, one enjoyable TV musical quantity and limitless literary doomsaying. And Mike Davis wrote the (precise) e book on excessive climate in Southern California.
However whereas these occasions typically spawn wildfires, floods and different calamities, they’re discrete phenomena that usually puncture in any other case nice instances. When the nice and cozy winds die down and the storms subside, we return to our recurrently scheduled October-June perfection (offered an influence line doesn’t fail and mild the San Gabriel Mountains on fireplace).
Not so with August, which guarantees dread for 31 days. Even the phrase, starting and ending with related vowel qualities, evinces monotony.
In July, with its June gloom leftovers, you may say, “Hey, summer season isn’t so unhealthy.” 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 recreation at Dodger Stadium in July or September. Nice, however test the forecast first. However Disneyland or Dodger Stadium beneath 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 toddler 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 Basic Medical Middle (which to me will all the time be “County Hospital”), she etched a silver lining across the unceasing discomfort and occasional issues of the ninth month: It could be the physique’s approach of constructing an individual much less petrified of childbirth.
So it was with August and for teenagers about to renew faculty, she as soon as advised me: The ultimate full month of summer season, on common the most well liked in L.A., had a approach of constructing youngsters stay up for the promise of cooler days in September, when faculty started.
Now, we’ve ruined even that, by shifting the beginning of college 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 youngsters 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, after they’re scribbling their first writing assignments of the yr and in search of inspiration, they may discover it of their poorly air conditioned lecture rooms or on scorching asphalt playgrounds unshaded from the August solar. The following era of Chandlers and Didions will detest this time of yr.
