Kevin Drum is incredulous about Joan Didion’s description of the Santa Ana winds. While it is probably a little over the top, there is a change in the atmosphere when those blasts of moisture-stripping wind barrel through the canyons and passes, howling and shrieking, and making your house shudder every once in a while.

Even though I grew up in Southern California, the traditional portrayal of the seasons holds sway even in my memory. Until I was 23, I had never seen the leaves turn color in fall, and yet I always expected them. I had never lived in a place where it snowed until I was in my 20s, either, and yet I always waited expectantly for it as winter made its way through the calendar. I’d wait like Linus, always disappointed about the Great Pumpkin not coming.

So the Santa Anas always had an otherworldly association with them. Who thinks of summer in late October? Of 85°F to 90°F highs?

It’s the cry of the wind that’s really eerie sometimes. There is something about it that disquiets the mind. And the dryness can leave your skin tingling.

But it has always been the fires that have been truly frightening. As I sit here in this urban oasis, tens of thousands of acres burn to the south of me and to the north of me, and hundreds of homes have been ravaged.

The smell of smoke upon the air has always made me think of autumn in So Cal.

The fires jump across canyons and across 15-lane freeways, with ease. The drought-stricken terrain literally explodes, and the fires race through almost a fast as lightning. It devours houses like some kind of angry, red/orange, wild animal.

(I still wonder if there is any way at all to prevent this. It can’t be mere coincidence that the Witch Creek Fire has taken some of the same paths that the Cedar Fire in 2003 took. Are developers not required to consider fire danger when they build?)

The big problem with Southern California in general is hop-skotch development. Even in dense areas like L.A., islands of wilderness lie in between developments. Think of the Griffith Park fire just a few months ago, within sight of Downtown L.A. Some of this is decreed by topography: it’s just impractical to build on steep mountainsides sometimes. But sometimes it’s also just poor planning.

Part of what is making the Witch Creek Fire so devastating is that it is blazing through tracts of mostly undeveloped land, interspersed with huge houses. All the roads leading through that area are two lanes wide, again partly decreed by topography, but also probably another symptom of poor planning. Despite the density in places like Escondido and the Tri-City area on the coast, there is that huge swath of land between Sorrento Valley and Encinitas, Rancho Bernardo and Escondido. Ironically, maybe that area would’ve fared better if it was fully developed, instead of harboring dessicated brush just waiting to be ignited.

It seems counter-intuitive, maybe. Maybe you would think that sprawl would be easier to defend, since everything is spread apart. But if the structures you’re trying to defend are spread apart, your fire fighting crews will have to spread apart as well. And the gaps in your defenses can be deadly.

New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Each of these densely populated urban centers have had their eponymous fires, practically obliterating them entirely. But with buildings relying more on concrete and steel than on wood now a days, when was the last time a huge American city burned to the ground?

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