Joan Didion views the Santa Ana winds as strange, sinister, and eerily otherworldly. To her, the Santa Ana winds are something to be simultaneously feared and revered, for they create an inexplicable shift in the air itself. The reasoning behind this strange shift cannot be explained, and the shift itself cannot be defined, and yet whenever a Santa Ana blows, everyone can feel it with a deep sureness without quite knowing or understanding how they can feel it. Outside the boundaries of all scientific explanation and beyond all logical reasoning, the Santa Ana winds have an unnatural effect every time they blow, and Didion conveys this eerie feeling of otherness perfectly through her use of diction, imagery, and tone. Didion captures the reader’s …show more content…
The repeated use of the word “some” serves to further reinforce this effect, because the word “some” has the same ambiguity as the word “something.” The words “stillness” and “tension” add to this sense of unease. Tension commonly clashes with stillness, and yet Didion says that both are present in the air before a Santa Ana. The contradictory nature of this sentence turns the mood even more ominous, because it shows that even nature itself is behaving unnaturally. “‘Anything can happen,’” Didion quotes novelist Raymond Chandler. This ominous statement creates a tense mood and makes the reader dread the coming of the Santa Ana, for surely with the Santa Ana will come something terrible. “The baby frets. The maid sulks...‘every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.’” A dark, unshakable atmosphere is created by Chandler’s quote, as well as by snippets from Didion’s personal experiences as a newcomer to Los Angeles, in which she relates unsettling tales of Indians, presumably driven by the Santa Ana, flinging themselves into the ocean, of an ocean that is normally wild and turbulent yet turns strangely glossy and quiet before a Santa Ana, of screaming peacocks and yellow skies and a neighbor living in a darkened house with her husband lurking at night with a machete. Yes, readers think, certainly anything can happen when the Santa Ana blows, because the …show more content…
She describes these other winds in a dry, factual manner, explaining how they occur. On the foehn she says, “...it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air becomes as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.” She says of the Israeli khamsin, “A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours that precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions.” Despite the mention of these hard, indisputably scientific facts, Didion leaves the readers distinctly unsettled, as her tone and choice of words is far from reassuring. Immediately after informing her audience of the difference in the ratio of ions before and during a Santa Ana, she goes on to dispel any reassurance that readers might have felt by saying, “No one seems to know exactly why that should be: some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances.” This last, final reminder of the unexplainable nature of the Santa Ana winds leaves an unsettling effect on the readers as the excerpt