Subtopic

Nobody wishes for a hurricane. A few politicians maybe desperate for a pile of mud-slick rubble to stand near and practice their Concerned Citizen Face. And maybe some climate scientists for whom every phenomenon is an opportunity for data collection like wind speed, water temperature, sea level, body count, you know, the standard measurables that can determine the really important things, like grant funding.

At the other extreme of course are insurance companies, whom I'm certain are investing a decent portion of the incoming funds for which they provide no functional or measurable service into fantastical weather-defeating technology. It's that or face the prospect of having to disburse a single dime to the people they cover, which is of course anathema to the business model, summed up in the three-word phrase: let's be ghouls.

Somewhere in the middle are regular people, the "nobody" of the first word of the first paragraph. We didn't really know what to expect when news people started using "hurricane" and "California" in the same sentence. At first, your brain automatically fills in "Baja" before "California" in such a construction, because any other usage just feels like jabberwock nonsense. It's like ordering pork chops at a bakery. "No no, darling, I'm sorry," you're tempted to say, with as little condescension as you can manage, "here we only do earthquake."

Even weirder when you're not only doing the new thing, you're doing both at the same time. As eschatological as it all sounds, it turns out I live too far south of Ojai to have felt the earthquake and too far west of Cathedral City to have gotten sandbagged by the hurricane. What we got here in the squishy inland middle was less wind than your standard session of Santa Anas. The rain of course was novel, but all rain in SoCal is novel, less so in this past year of unusual conditions, whatever you call the opposite of "drought."

So did we wish for a hurricane? No, of course not, a hurricane is inconvenient as hell, like car trouble or your sick older parents. There's never a good time for one. We had to have some communities up in the mountains evacuate because the exit routes were limited in case shit went south, or in the case of water-sodden slopes giving way in mudslides, down. Imagine spending the money to live in Arrowhead or Wrightwood or wherever, where you're ready for the occasional inferno or beetle blight or whatever, but tropical storm? Fuck all the way off. You'd almost dare it to try, just for the experience.

Down here on the flatlands, it rained. On and off, pretty steady, for a few hours less than they said on either end (started later, ended earlier). City maintenance workers had stripped the asphalt layer off the top of part of the main street out here before the water came, so that got messy and pocky as some parts dissolved into instant potholes of impressive scope, but that was about as close to actual destruction as we got, some above-average testing of your car's suspension.

In the meantime... was it all bad, on balance? Some extra water from the sky runs up the score in a deep-breath year amid inevitable periods of aridity and want, gone and to come. And it pushes off a fire season fueled by a growth explosion of underbrush in the inaccessible chaparral, if only for a few extra weeks. I guess what I'm saying is: don't worry about us so much, we seem to have done OK. Keep sending money and aid to Lahaina if you want to stress about hurricane by-products. Out here, as everywhere, the best kind of danger is the one that never comes to pass. And "consequence" isn't always a swear word. A year ago we were ready to go to war with Nevada and Arizona over water and now we're all practically swimming in it.