There is something uncanny in the waterfall materializing over the 405 freeway today, some frenetic motion, some intensity. As if an act of god had transported South American cataracts into the smoggy airspace above our cars.
The 405, a coastal offshoot of the main California North-South highway corridor, passes through Los Angeles before joining up again with the 5. This is the second day it has been under siege by something far worse than rush-hour traffic: El Niño.
The 72-hour stretch of torrential rain, which began on Jan. 4th and will conclude sometime in the wee hours of the next day, marks the first spell the roguish weather pattern has cast on Southern California this year. Flooding has bombarded the UK. Yet around these parts, which were desert long before manicured lawns (or, in modern times, posh cactus gardens) appeared, water tends to be a welcome relief.
Most autumns and winters, the Southland knows a dryness that sweeps into corners with a faint burning stench and the maddening rustle of Van Gogh’s last wheatfields: the Santa Ana winds. “The season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows,” Joan Didion wrote of the Santa Ana in her “Los Angeles Notebook” essay.
What happens when a dried-up, sun-spoiled population primed for angsty breezes collides with a solid three-day wall of rain?
CHILD OF GOD
“The effects on California are probabilistic,” David Pierce, a University of California, San Diego climate scientist, insists on telling me upfront.
What he means is that media reports of this El Niño’s monstrous power have been greatly exaggerated—or at least presented too conclusively. Pierce explains that there are two ways to measure an El Niño: ocean surface temperature and atmospheric effects.
By the first measurement, this El Niño is certainly not the strongest California has faced. But here’s where things get complicated. Technically speaking, there is no such thing as an El Niño in California. The term refers to warming ocean temperatures way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, El Niño (which means “little boy” in Spanish) got its name from the warm currents that arrived around Christmas, in honor of baby Jesus, according to a report from a late-19th-century Peruvian scientist.
But over here in North America, we never experience the warming effects. Instead, when ocean and climate interact, weather changes reverberate across the North American land mass. So it’s the second measurement, atmospheric effects, which actually determines the extent to which I regret the decision to leave my rain boots behind in Boston.
And this particular year is heavy on atmospheric effects. Sadly, though, Southern Californians who were hoping that El Niño would be their savior from the recent drought crisis must keep praying.
“The depths we’ve dug ourselves into with the drought…” says Pierce with an undercurrent of bitterness, referencing a two-year deficit in the state’s reservoirs. “One year with El Niño is very unlikely to make that up.”
Instead, it’s a long, uncertain winter ahead, with a high likelihood of more storms. Pierce recommends cleaning out the drains.
MEMORIAL
Driving in the blinding wet gray, I asked if they remembered El Niño. “My first year out here, it rained like the dickens all through Christmas,” said my grandfather.
“These women went up to the canyon to make dinner for the firemen,” my grandmother said. “And a mudslide crashed through the window and killed them.” I thought it sounded apocryphal, but then it turned out to be worse. In 1969, nearly 50 people hid out in the Silverado Canyon fire station from flooding brought on by El Niño. Then, the hillside collapsed into the station, killing five and burying many more.
Everyone who’s tarried in Southern California long enough has them: visions of El Niños past. We pray for rain, but we don’t pray for this—the destruction and devastation when loose earth, left far too long in the desert sun, silts up with water and comes crashing down on itself. Think of a glacier calving, chunks of solidity shearing off at a breath. Now think of a glacier covered in houses.
The last particularly tenacious El Niño descended here in 1997—the same year a local playhouse premiered a little show by Richard Greenberg called “Three Days of Rain” (later known as the vehicle for Julia Roberts’s Broadway debut). In the play, three characters attempt to reconstruct the events of a mysterious diary entry written by one of their fathers. The second act depicts what really happened, all those years ago. Betrayal, unexpected intimacy, and so many secrets unfold as the sky torments itself outside a Manhattan loft.
But this is Los Angeles. Ambiguity is nice and all, but we are going to the beach no matter what comes out of the sky.
RAIN ROOM
If a certain class of Angelenos could—without getting a spot of rain on their convertibles or coiffed hair—magically inject the reservoirs full of water, they’d do it as fast as they Botox 30 years away in a day.
Unfortunately, physics exist. So instead they console themselves in the usual way: buying or “I know a guy”-ing their way into exclusive tickets for a much-hyped exhibition.
They get in their cars, curse the excessive caution of authorities who have closed parts of two major SoCal freeways, and zigzag furiously toward the museum while the sky vomits out it guts. Perhaps concerned, the Los Angeles Times pointed its readers to a video on “How to Drive in the Rain.” Pro tip: “Maintain control of your car.” Also: “Wipers remove water from the windshield.”
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has imported a British art installation called “Rain Room.” In a black room with theatrical lighting, a perfect grid of rain falls onto waiting grates below. Look, there, a tentative toddler wading her way into the downpour. And here comes the art: She doesn’t get wet.
Thanks to some complicated motion-sensor technology I don’t understand, this is one storm that won’t soak your socks. Heck, you can even selfie in it.
Of a far different weather phenomenon than rain, Didion wrote: “To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior… the wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
Perhaps, then, El Niño gives us back a bit of our agency—or at the very least, our irrepressible human stubbornness. Thor smites Southern California with ferocity and a tide of alien water, and we drive our cars at the posted speed limit. Hillsides crumble, and we rebuild our houses in the canyon.
Rain buckets down on freeways and sidewalks for three days, and we go to exorbitant lengths for the privilege of walking through indoor ceiling sprinklers without getting wet.
There is something particularly of Los Angeles in the exodus toward a sleeker version of Mother Nature with better camera angles. The Southland has always promised to be a kind of rain room, a place where you can fulfill the old Western dream of life’s benefits without the work. We will survive this latest deluge as we always have done: in the dry hull of our own delusion.
