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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Waiting for the Warm Night Air of Los Angeles
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: March 11, 2005

Ever since I got to Southern California, people have been reminding me that 
this part of the world has its seasons, too. I always agree. I can think of 
at least four seasons in Los Angeles: rain, fire, escrow and the Academy 
Awards. Some years the rainy season comes and goes without attracting much 
attention to itself, but not this year. There's something a little 
redundant in being told, in the midst of another downpour, that Los Angeles 
does indeed have seasons. It almost sounds like complaining.

There's an old Midwestern guilt in that need to account for the seasons 
here. I think of all the Iowa families who moved to California about the 
same time my family did, in the mid-1960's. For most of them in that first 
generation, lying in the sun - just lying there! - seemed an unaccountable 
waste of time. They could barely allow themselves the pleasure of eating 
outdoors without fussing over the pleasure of eating outdoors.

Telling the ones who stayed in the Midwest that there are seasons here, 
too, was a kind of cultural negotiation, a way of saying, "We're not all 
that different just because we live in California and dine on artichokes 
now." The fact that the growing season is 365 days long felt like a plenary 
indulgence, even if you were a Methodist.

Any place with as many climates - or as much climate, allowing the word its 
salutary overtones - as Southern California doesn't really need seasons. To 
drive from San Juan Capistrano over the Santa Ana Mountains on the Ortega 
Highway and up through Riverside to the snowpack on the San Bernardino 
Mountains is to cross any number of climatic zones, each of which is 
enjoying a season unto itself. Southern California has a way of reminding 
you that climate is a function of place and that season is a function of time.

A climatic zone may be tiny - no larger than a damp winter creek-bottom in 
an otherwise arid landscape. And a season in Southern California may be 
only a matter of days. One day feels like sodden winter, and by the evening 
of the next day, the middle-school girls are playing soccer under the field 
lights, the shriek of the referees' whistles cutting through the warm night 
air. Summer comes over and over and over. As a result, everyone is equipped 
to seize it the instant it appears. Back home - in New York state - the 
winter coats are put away with a sense of reluctant foreboding, and only 
after a good spell of hot weather.

I sense the encroaching season here readily enough - the way a plum-blossom 
spring overlaps with the constancy of agave and yucca. But I miss the sense 
of time. The days are longer than they were when we arrived in mid-January. 
And yet it's hard to feel their lengthening. That's partly because of the 
orange perma-glow in the urban sky at night. But it's also because of the 
fact that light isn't the cue that my students, who are keenly and 
hormonally sensitive to climatic disturbance, are really waiting for.

They're waiting - and the whole region with them - for warm nights. Here, 
every night is a convertible night, unless it's pouring. But with real 
warmth, the stoicism of keeping the top down will give way to the sybaritic 
pleasure of merging with the biotic city, all those beings feasting on air.

Whenever I think of where we are in the year - on the verge of spring - I 
think of home, of our farm north of New York City and the winter it's been 
having. I can imagine the operatic movement of the light, the way each day 
reaches a little further into the darkness of evening and morning than the 
one before.

Those extra minutes of dawn and dusk are almost pure emotion at this time 
of year, as if something had been reclaimed that was in danger of 
disappearing forever. It's almost as if that place - its snowy pastures, 
its huddled woods - were on a separate globe, pursuing a more elliptical 
path around the sun than the planet Los Angeles occupies.

Emotion is the difference, of course. The irises are in bloom in Southern 
California. But what is an iris? Back home it's something won back from the 
cold and the snow, a rigorous assertion that winter may come again, but 
only by going through summer first.

That is not what the irises are saying here. They are blooming with the 
roses and the oranges and the birds of paradise and the rosemary and the 
lavender and the camellias. To me it makes no sense, no matter how 
beautiful it is. To the nectarivorous creatures here - to bees and moths 
and hummingbirds - it merely seems, perhaps, like the slight swelling of 
their circumstances. Much is blooming now, but then something is always 
blooming here in this nectared city.