Our town backs up to the local mountains. Some cities have houses facing the sea. We have Mother Saddleback staring at our backyards. Fire ravaged the steep areas on the very edges of Rancho Santa Margarita a few months ago, burning all the way to the summit and up the slopes of the valley on the other side for miles. Last Wednesday Santa Ana winds roared through the pass connecting our town with cities on the other side of Saddleback.
These are sustained gusts that push west from desert to the Pacific at anywhere from twenty to fifty miles an hour. When you combine those winds with all the ash from the forest fires that still covers Saddleback you get a thick black cloud of soot that blows hard down the valley and coats everything — cars, patios, roads, lungs, and on. It looks like a thick black fog.
That's the scene I woke up to Wednesday morning. The canyon behind our house was a wall of ash and soot. This matched my mood from the election results so it didn't seem all that remarkable — just another harbinger of things going horribly askew. I couldn't go for a run. We had to cancel practice because the air was so wretched. My backyard still needs a good power washing. Sadie the Lab tracked that dirt all over the house and left her footprints on the beige outdoor couch. When I went to light the barbecue last night a fine layer of grit had permeated beneath the hood and needed to be removed before I could use the grill.
Through every moment like these, I try to keep to my routine. So it is that I set aside the election and the winds and spent a few hours on my fiction project and then a few more going through the copy editor's comments for Taking Midway.
These are fun. She goes through each detail in the book, sentence by sentence, then sends back the complete manuscript with comments and corrections. It's all very civil. Things like "au: change OK to correct dangling modifying phrase?" I am "au" — author.
There are many other little details to address, so much so that three hours of addressing the queries got me through only forty pages of a 310-page book. And that comment about dangling modifying phrases was repeated so many times that I realized two things: I do that a lot when I write; and, I have no idea what a dangling modifying phrase is. When all the whiz kids were diagramming sentences and learning to recognize gerunds and participles, this guy was not paying attention in the slightest. I have no idea how I passed high school English.
I should add that I have a thing for copy editors. I believe them to be individuals of great genius.
Then, when we were able once again, I found solace in designing workouts for my team. There will be no October Surprise for my boys team but my girls are lights out. Afternoon practice is so incredibly wonderful to witness each day.
All of this is my way of saying it's been a week. Just one big Santa Ana wind to be endured.
But as Tom Petty sang, "The weak grow strong, the strong carry on," or something very similar to that.
So push forward, always forward, one dangling modifying phrase at a time.