On-Shore Flo

Folks inland don’t know about her. Or those in the San Fernando Valley. Beverly Hills is where it is because they wanted no part of On-Shore Flo. We in Santa Monica and other beach towns greet her every morning. Sometimes she hangs around till sundown so Valleyites drive here all day to get away from the 102 temperatures and make a U-turn when they land in this country with a different climate. Sorry folks but there ain’t no sun up in that sky. Not with On-Shore Flo.

One hundred plus years ago, before it became a collection of outskirts, Los Angeles was a sleepy little Pueblo. It was settled about thirty miles inland from the ocean. Orange groves thrived in the sun. Hollywood stars and starlets craved it. Nothing like a healthy suntan. Might as well smoke a pack a day while you’re at it. They just couldn’t handle On-Shore Flo. The coastal towns were for poor people who couldn’t afford a slice of sunlight and aircraft mechanics during the war who caught a few hours’ sleep in tiny bungalows which now sell for a million dollars or more.

Here we are six blocks from land’s end. We’ve come to appreciate On-Shore Flo, aka Marine air. Having lived for decades in six S.F. Valley cities Peggy and I combined have had our fill of scorching, stale air. We happily traded sizzling smog for salty, sunless gusts. 

On-Shore Flo is Poseidon’s breath, whales spout, the fresh breeze from Asia, what remains of their typhoon, gulls surfing in on drafts of salt spray, and surfers riding the green room to the sand. It is the force which will blot out the sun for an hour or an afternoon. 

When Gusty Winds met On-Shore Flo it was a marriage made on a Greek Isle. It launched a thousand ships to Troy with bloated sails. It favored the Brits and howled against the Spanish Armada for Francis Drake. It led Ahab to his watery grave messing with the Great White Moby. Flo and Gus wave the flag, boys, and carry the ball over the fence for a walk-off grand slam or the exhalation stored in Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks that blows his trumpet and John Coltrane's bluesy sax in a jam session at Hermosa Beach where the Lighthouse keeps jazz alive.

Don’t blame On-Shore Flo for those wildfires. That’s her wicked cousin, Santa Ana, those desert ill-winds bending boughs with cyclonic fury in her tantrums and torching chaparral. Gusty winds belong below the canyons. Unlike On-Shore Flo, Gus causes mischief upturning trailers on the Grapevine. Years ago he wreaked havoc at an art installation by Christo lifting an umbrella, turning it into a lethal missile.

(My mother was fluent in the language of wind. She could hear that dreaded draft howling outside our window like a wolf at the door. What seemed like simple wind to me was a miasma to her which penetrated my three sweaters with its evil germs. Something had to be blamed for that sore throat and fever. After 2-3 days off from school with a constant flow of therapeutic air from the vaporizer I was restored but not until I spent a half day inhaling swaths of fresh air in the sun. Ah, but I digress.)

The weather report, which is 98% accurate 2% of the time, says the high at the beach today will be 80 degrees. But we know better. That will be for ten minutes as the sun goes down. For now it is an overcast 65. We have inherited the wind. What Hollywood promised to be Gone with the Wind when it burned down Atlanta (at the NW corner of Overland and Culver Blvd.) never did leave us…. with strange fruit hanging from trees one hundred years later, then choke holds and quick triggers.

This morning is another slow dance between cloud cover and the sun behind it. On-Shore Flo is a shroud mourning our sorry planet in this Age of Donald. Until solar power burns it off it feels as if the world could be starting over again. The diva is gargling back stage. The curtain hasn’t gone up yet. We are coming out of our primordial ooze. In this half-light the brisk air is nascent. It could be Creation 2.0 in that great gettin-up morning, fare thee well, fare thee well.