Sunstorms rage, people get to work anyway

I am so glad I have another week off from work, because San Diego is getting ripped with a brutal series of sunstorms right now, and it looks like they won't let up until at least Friday. I take my coffee outside at 7 a.m. and sit on the glider in shorts and t-shirt and grieve for those people in their cars down on the freeway, plowing grimly through a bitterly balmy morning toward the office. I see neighbors down the hillside stepping into their driveways. For a long minute, they look up at the eggshell-blue sky, searching for a cloud to take the edge off. They stand there, hands on hips, looking around as if trying to make up their minds about something. Finally they grimly pull open a car door, step inside, and drive slowly down the street.

I'll have to join them in another week. Oh, sunstorms blast us all winter long, from December into March. All it takes is a bit of a high pressure system forming over what we call "the great basin," up Utah way. Winds rotate clockwise around the system, get dried out over Nevada, Utah and Arizona, then blast into our mountain passes and foothills at speeds up to 60 miles an hour. In summer and fall, these are the winds that whip tiny blazes into gargantuan firestorms. The Cedar Fire, in October of 2003, raced from the back country down into eastern San Diego at a speed of 6,000 acres an hour.

Sunstorms are different. They hit during the rainy season, when the fire threat is minimal. Outside with my iced tea an hour ago, the hillsides were all a soft green. The January winds serve mainly to blow out all pollution, send humidity plunging, temperatures roaring into the 70s by sunrise, and burying Southern Calfornia beneath blue skies you can see Hawaii through.

Against this, humans have to get up as usual, drag themselves out of bed, shuffle through breezes as soft as a baby's breath to get the paper, and somehow get to work because they know that schools and businesses are not going to close. In 36 winters in Southern California, I have never known of schools and businesses ever closing, not even once.

I'm not asking for pity. People who move to Southern California learn very quickly what they've gotten into. It only takes two years to become a sunstorm veteran. I remember grumbling about it in those early days, because we never got any credit. The Midwest and East have been battling snowstorms for the last week. It was all over the media. Brave Americans doing their best to get to work and school through horrific whiteouts and sheets of ice on the streets. They didn't want to, but it could get so bad that authorities would close schools and businesses and urge everyone to stay home, out of danger. The economy could wait.

Did we see or hear a word about brave Southern Californians, windows rolled down, navigating through hideous lightouts, fighting off hallucinations of lawn chairs and tall cool pitchers of refreshment? Not that I saw or heard. I feel guilty, because I can stay home this week. This cry for equal treatment is not for me. It's for them. They deserve at least a few paragraphs of coverage.