Burnt Off

Posted on August 10, 2003 in Weather

A slight breeze came out of somewhere and raked the air so clean that I could make out the individual shrubs on the hillsides two miles away. The haze was light even in San Bernardino, where we went to help my mother clean my old junk out of the garage. The thermometer next to her front door gave the temperature as 100 F, 38 C.

Traffic coming home through the Santa Ana River Canyon bubbled up from the sea, all the folks who’d fled the hot vallies to lay on the sand, getting tans and slipping into the waves for the sake of bringing their body temperatures down a few degrees. Here in Trabuco Canyon, the mercury stalled about 9 degrees F, 6 degrees Celsius below the inland vallies. As I write, partial cloud cover slides over the inversion layer. By afternoon, when I usually wake, only the darkest part of the mist will show, faintly interrupting my line of sight to the mountains.