Tag: California

A tall, dense, freshwater marsh plant (bulrush) native to the western United States, growing in thick stands around lakes, marshes, and river deltas. Tule marshes once covered vast areas of California's Central Valley. The plant gives its name to tule fog — the dense, ground-level radiation fog that forms in the Central Valley in winter, reducing visibility to near zero.

An earthquake. The word carries a different weight than its English equivalent — less clinical, more physical, closer to the body's experience of the ground shuddering beneath it. In California and the American Southwest, temblor is used interchangeably with "earthquake" in both journalism and conversation, a linguistic inheritance from the Spanish-speaking culture that named the landscape first.

 A hot, dry, katabatic wind that blows from the desert interior of Southern California toward the coast, most commonly from October through March. It arrives with extreme low humidity, gusting through mountain passes at near-hurricane speeds, and is the primary driver of the region's catastrophic wildfires. The wind is also credited — in folklore and in the nervous systems of those who live with it — with inducing anxiety, insomnia, and bad decisions.

 The Northern California counterpart of the Santa Ana — a hot, dry, offshore wind that blows from the northeast through the San Francisco Bay Area, most dangerously in autumn. Named for Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County. The Diablo winds drove the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the 2018 Camp Fire, and multiple other devastating wildfires.

Dense, drought-adapted, fire-dependent shrubland characteristic of Southern California and the coastal mountain ranges — a tough, aromatic tangle of chamise, manzanita, ceanothus, and scrub oak that grows chest- to head-high, burns hot and fast, and regenerates from the roots. Chaparral defines the smell, the feel, and the fire regime of the California hills.