Brush Fires By Linda Thomas Analysis

Joan Didion explains the unbearable heat by stating how “the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew.” This goes to show just how unbearable the heat is. She also explains that her only neighbor won’t come out of her house and her husband walks around with a machete, complaining of hearing “trespassers and rattlesnakes.” This description shows how much the Santa Ana winds effect people. When the winds blow, Didion describes how she is unable to sleep, because of the “screaming peacocks.” She says the “absense of the eerie surf” keeps her awake, since its something she is not used to. The winds create a “yellow cast” over the sky and turns the “Pacific ominously glossy.” All of these descriptions create the catastrophic image of the Santa Ana

Didion personifies the wind as almost an unknown epidemic. Similar to when an unknown disease goes viral, all walks of life are affected. Didion clearly states how teachers, students, doctors, to physicists, to generally everyone becomes unhappy and uncomfortable during the winds. She does not write of how the wind caused fire to ravage the shrublands, but she writes of the symptoms it inflicts on the people. Didion mentions all the after effects of the wind and the harm it can do like inflict paranoia. She mentions how the fear-stricken victims of southern California are paranoid like her neighbor that refuses to leave the house and her husband who roams with a machete. Didion’s personification of the wind focuses on a fearful and distant light.

Joan Didion in her essay, “The Santa Ana” and Linda Thomas in her essay, “Brush Fire” describes the Santa Ana in two opposing stands with similar moves. Didion's purpose in writing her essay for the Santa Ana is to inform her readers. She informs them about the Santa Ana, the effect the winds have on human behavior, and how they have to live with the Santa Ana. Thomas writes her essay to engage readers on the Santa Ana’s effect on brushes. She gives details on how the Santa Ana causes natural brush fires and the beauty it is able to create in the aftermath.

Both writers approach the topic of the Santa Ana winds very differently, although they both wish to inform different people about the effects of the winds. Each author has a different point of view and purpose than the other. Didion wanted to write

Didion’s descriptive diction helps readers envision effects of the unusual Santa Ana Winds. She says that, “we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night” which effectively brings to mind thoughts of fires caused by the Santa Ana Winds without having to directly reference them. Later in her essay, she uses small details to emphasize the widespread effects when she

     The main theme of Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee is taking a

Didion uses it as a phrase of fear and anxiousness but Thomas manages to take away the fear affiliated with smoke and fire and turns it into a thing of beauty. At this point the texts diverge from one another in their viewpoints of brush fires. That forewarning of danger in The Santa Ana comes into play throughout the text, but especially lives up to its full potential in paragraph 5, "At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines" (Didion). This fact coupled with statistics such as "on the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning" exemplifies the potential damage that the brush fires are capable of. On the contrary, in Brush Fire, Thomas describes the environment and the natural wildlife of the area that can be found in the "chaparral", a local name for the "vast expanses of low-lying brush".

Through the use of figurative language, Didion conveys the ominousness of the Santa Ana winds. She explains that the winds will come “whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes.” The author personifies the winds, causing them to appear more threatening. The foreboding atmosphere of the winds causes a mechanistic and unusual change in people’s behavior. Didion describes how she “rekindle[s] a waning argument with the telephone company.” The threat of the winds causes the author restart an old argument The use of personification characterizes the winds as threatening and shows how the winds alter people’s behavior.

Writer , Linda Thomas, in her essay, Brush Fire, discusses the Santa Ana winds experienced in Southern California and how it affects the people and the weather. Well-known essayist , Joan Didion, in her essay, The Santa Ana, describes the winds and the effects it has on the way the people behave. Both Thomas and Didion’s essays have a similar subject and circumstance, the Santa Ana winds but, both essays vary in numerous ways. The details, tone, and how the message is being told are ways in which both essays differ. These essays are an example of one topic being portray through different lights.

In her article “Santa Ana”, Joan Didion explain how the Santa Ana winds affect human behavior. While informing the reader with facts about the Santa Ana she demonstrates that the Santa Ana winds cause people to act irritably, erratically and strangely and makes people become greatly unhappy.

In her essay, Didion uses a very ominous and foreboding tone to convey the topic of the Santa Ana winds. From the very beginning of the essay, the reader is given a feeling that these Santa Ana winds possess a type of evil in them that seem to affect people for the worse. The reader is never allowed to look past the negative effects of the Santa Ana winds. I will explain how Joan Didion does this in the following examples.

The damage is widespread. For kilometres all to be seen is blackened trunks and shrivelled leaves consumed by the smoky breath of fire. Looking closely, it could be conceived that each individual tree appears scarred; trunks reduced to charcoal, with dying embers glowing incandescently. But after time, the landscape changes. Green shoots poke up through the ground; worming their way towards the sunlight. Ferns tendril from the hollows of blackened trees, bringing life back into a landscape that was made so desolate by the searing flames. The rebirth has begun and these new plants will flourish and form a new, widespread landscape more rich and full of life than its predecessor.

On the island in Iceland where the volcano erupted, a lot of people didn’t go back, either, but many did. McPhee does a good job of getting the points of view of the people who choose the risk. Some people have no choice—they were born in a threatened place and don’t have the means to move, but others build or buy expensive homes on the slopes of unstable mountains. He finds experts on the geology of the San Gabriels who consciously live right in the path of potential debris flows, as well as real estate agents who blithely talk their way around the risk, reassuring potential buyers more than they ought to be reassured. McPhee’s interest in the human beings involved as well as the earth makes him a great story-teller. A little distractible, a little inclined to collect as many anecdotes as possible, but never dull. He can make alarming and complex scientific material readable without making it any less alarming. The issues are not old. I did a little research before writing this review. People studying the Old River Control structure where the Atchafalaya is being—for now—prevented from capturing the Mississippi still say McPhee’s article that was the basis for this book is the best thing ever written on the topic. Debris flows are still endangering California towns. People still live where nature could cover them up with water, lava or rocks on short notice, and they

“The Horrific Wreck of the City” says, “I was thrown on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looming up more terrible because of the odd dance they were performing wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. Screeches rent the air as terrified humanity streamed out into the open in agony of despair.” Likewise, “The street beds heaved in frightful fashion. The earth rocked and then came the blow that wrecked San Francisco from the bay shore to the Ocean Beach and from the Golden Gate to the end of the peninsula.” These quotes show how destructive the earthquake was because the first one talks about how buildings were crashing down into the streets of San Francisco; and the second quote talks about how San Francisco was wrecked by the rocking of the earth. “Comprehending the Calamity” says, “The spirals of smoke now began to ascend from various places In the business section, and we realized how completely we were at the mercy of fire, with the broken water-mains, and reservoirs perhaps destroyed. The gas and water had been cut off immediately to most of our homes. The electricity was gone too.” Similarly, “Men, met, introduced one another; exchanged business cards of places consumed by the flames,