28 29 THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW “Go back to bed,” Dad responded grumpily. As one can probably deduce, you do not tell an 8-year-old to do the impossible when the world around him is alien. But I crawled back to my sheets, gathered them tightly around me like chainmail, and let the twisted lullaby of my staccato heartbeat sing me to sleep. I awoke to the familiar cries of parrots soaring over our home, as they always did (they had escaped the zoo years earlier and moved into the neighborhood). The hallway windows outside my room outlined a fresh morning that glistened brightly and suggested that nothing out of the ordinary had happened overnight. The roiling wind seemed but a dream. The branches littering our backyard like battlefield corpses suggested otherwise. Mom tried to make toast for breakfast and learned that our power was gone, but the gas blessedly still worked. Dad got out the emergency radio and learned that thousands of trees were downed everywhere. LAX had grounded all flights. The area had experienced constant 97 miles per hour winds, with gusts up to 167. A state of emergency had been declared for the entire 385 square miles of the San Gabriel Valley. The Catholic school called and announced school was canceled. My brother Laurence and I giddily celebrated the break from school. We ate buttery scrambled eggs while overlooking the carnage in our backyard. “What in the world happened last night?” I asked my father. My young mind searched for an adultish word to impress him. “It was… frightening.” Even that descriptor seemed inadequate. “It was the Santa Ana winds,” Dad explained. “The what?” I chimed. “What’s that?” Laurence chirped. “It’s a weather phenomenon that happens in California during the fall,” Dad responded. I spooned more eggs into my mouth. “It’s kind of like a hurricane, but without the rain, and it doesn’t rotate.” The description seemed odd. What kind of storm visits and bears no rain? And the name was so plain, yet haunting. In my mind, the name should’ve been whispered fearfully between passing strangers and hissed between gritted teeth like an epithet. Santa Ana is coming. She cannot be stopped. She shows no mercy. Our dad took us outside to check for any damage. In the backyard, the swings on the swing set were tossed over the crossbar. Paper airplanes that I had lost in the rain gutters were rammed in bushes and wet with dew on the grass. The mysterious midnight sun that I noticed was produced by transformers blowing across town. It was their light that had lent the night its freakish glow. The THUMP that had awoken me was simply our gate rocking drunkenly on its hinges, torn loose from its lock.
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