Here we are, in the middle of August in Los Angeles, and I’m here to say: This is awful.
You already knew that if you reside in the valleys or really anywhere north or east of downtown L.A. Those of us who do, well … we see those August forecast highs of, say, 86 degrees for “Los Angeles” (as if the city’s 469 square miles exclude Van Nuys or Woodland Hills), reflexively tack on 10 or 15 degrees and quietly deal with our dread.
To those of you who live in areas cooled by the Pacific Ocean’s breezes, try this: Drive a few miles inland, say “August” and see what happens. Utter it audibly, and someone within earshot might bleat, “Ugh.” Say it in your head after spending the afternoon here, and it’ll be you who mutters in disgust.
August in L.A. doesn’t get the scorn it deserves. Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion familiarized everyone east of the Mississippi River with the Santa Ana winds, so much that their undeserved mystique has lent itself to at least one cringe-worthy rom-com scene, one fun TV musical number and endless literary doomsaying. And Mike Davis wrote the (actual) book on extreme weather in Southern California.
But while those events often spawn wildfires, floods and other calamities, they are discrete phenomena that generally puncture otherwise pleasant times. When the warm winds die down and the storms subside, we go back to our regularly scheduled October-June perfection (provided a power line doesn’t fail and light the San Gabriel Mountains on fire).
Not so with August, which promises dread for 31 days. Even the word, beginning and ending with similar vowel qualities, evinces monotony.
In July, with its June gloom leftovers, you might say, “Hey, summer isn’t so bad.” But when August arrives and the reality of interminable day-and-night heat hits, it’s, “We’re really doing this.”
Say someone offers you a free ticket to Disneyland or a day game at Dodger Stadium in July or September. Great, but check the forecast first. But Disneyland or Dodger Stadium under the August sun? Death march.
Perhaps I’m biased. Vin Scully died on Aug. 2, 2022. A year later to the day, my mom died. As a child growing up in Glendale, I vividly recall the Verdugo Mountains hiding for much of August behind a curtain of smog, as if to add a suffocating, claustrophobic quality to the threat of heat stroke.
Speaking of my mom — who dreaded summer heat probably more than anyone else — she once likened August to the final weeks of pregnancy. An OB-GYN nurse at Los Angeles General Medical Center (which to me will always be “County Hospital”), she etched a silver lining around the unceasing discomfort and occasional complications of the ninth month: It may be the body’s way of making a person less fearful of childbirth.
So it was with August and for kids about to resume school, she once told me: The final full month of summer, on average the hottest in L.A., had a way of making children look forward to the promise of cooler days in September, when school began.
Now, we’ve ruined even that, by shifting the start of school ever earlier into the worst month of the year. Before college, I never started class before Labor Day — but on Tuesday, not even halfway into August, my children will begin their cruelly named “fall” term in the Alhambra Unified School District. L.A. Unified kids will go back even earlier, on Monday.
Channeling my mom, perhaps there’s a far-off silver lining to this: With rising generations being plunked back into the classroom at the hottest time of year, the dearth of literary wailing over August in L.A. may end. After all, when they’re scribbling their first writing assignments of the year and looking for inspiration, they might find it in their poorly air conditioned classrooms or on sizzling asphalt playgrounds unshaded from the August sun. The next generation of Chandlers and Didions will loathe this time of year.