“I am a chronicler of menace, as all California writers eventually come to be, but in all my years writing about this place, I had never heard of such a thing.”
Mark Arax, the brilliant Fresno-based journalist and author, is talking here about the “bomb cyclone”—a phrase he'd heard for the first time back in December, when the first wave of this winter’s megastorms was headed for California. Writing for The New York Times on Jan. 23, Arax was responding to national coverage of the apparent disaster that had struck California, in a piece titled: “My State Is 1,000 Miles Long, and Not Everyone Living in It Hates the Rain.”
“The great deluge of 2023 has come and gone and left us Californians wondering what to make of it all,” Arax writes (albeit optimistically). “Do we shake our fists at the sky or thank the heavens? How to apprehend the loss of life and property alongside the gift of rain and snow that might break a decade’s drought?”
A former LA Times senior writer, Arax is our most articulate expert on California drought. His latest book, 2019’s The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, explains where we are, how we got here, and how this particular menace threatens our state.
This week on California Local, our own Jonathan Vankin tells you everything you need to know about drought in a classic Explainer. (Explanatory journalism—that's Jon's thing). When we assigned the story, we were still in the midst of a decades-long drought—possibly the driest period to afflict the North American West in 1,200 years. Then the skies opened up.
And so today I find myself writing about drought while watching rain come down in torrents—at the tail end of the wettest winter we’ve seen in decades. That might seem ironic, or paradoxical, or stupid, but as the stories here show, it’s a little bit weirder than that.
