Marine Layer

(Dallas Raines, Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Contributing Photographer, OC Register, 2024)

I was flipping through terrestrial television channels recently when I was surprised to see Dallas Raines doing the weather. Dallas Raines has been doing the weather in Los Angeles since we last hosted the Olympics, and it seems he’ll be here for our next one.

In the 90 seconds he was on air, he said “marine layer” 4 times. Marine layer this, marine layer that. He seemed genuinely concerned about the effects the marine layer would have on our lives that day.

I met Dallas once at a celebrity golf tournament out in La Cañada. He sported his beautiful orange tan and otherworldly flowing hair. A man built entirely for television standing in the sun, at ease in his world. I saw him another time getting out of his red Pantera at Gladstone’s in Malibu. Both times he looked exactly like himself, which is rare in Los Angeles for people you know through television. Dallas Raines is always Dallas Raines. He has been telling Los Angeles the same thing for decades, that the weather is fine, that it will remain fine, and that any deviation from fine is temporary. He doesn’t have much else to say, but why would he? People keep coming to Los Angeles for the weather, and Dallas is always there to announce it.

There is so little actual weather in Los Angeles that writers have to work hard to give it a voice. Joan Didion, one of my literary heroes, wrote about the Santa Ana winds like an indictment. The warm winds arrive, our nerves get taut, and suddenly we’ve lost control of things. The Santa Anas, she argued, explained the outlandish behavior of her day. They gave the city permission for its worst impulses. In her view, the winds were hot and violent, almost operatic.

The marine layer doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t make you do anything.

The marine layer forms when cool air rolls off the Pacific and sits. There is no storm, no rage to report. It just settles over the Bay like a lid, and suddenly everything has disappeared, and Catalina is gone, and the ocean is still out there, but you can only hear it. Your mood changes to match the temperature.

Living in the South Bay, the isolated end of Los Angeles, the marine layer boxes you in. Why would you go anywhere when you don’t know what’s past the gray?

This time of year, it can stay thick for days. It can make you feel stuck, not just physically, but metaphorically. Here you are, in a place you have known your whole life, surrounded by all this useless beauty, ignoring it because you would have to look through the gray to find it.

And suddenly you’re trapped in a Morrissey song because every day is like Sunday. If there’s coffee, you might stay inside and hide, but when you emerge eventually you notice that everyone else is affected too. People are pushing their carts in the Gelson’s a little slower, and they are finally slowing down in the parking lot. Things are being done in a lackadaisical, half-hearted manner. Urgency has left us, and our laid-back manner risks sliding into checked out.

That Los Angeles’ preeminent weatherman is named Dallas Raines is proof of predestination. It sounds like a name an actor might choose when he arrived here, but he came by it honestly.

He is seventy-two years old, and I get the feeling he will keep delivering weather forever. He will keep telling us what we already know. That June is here, that the air is thick and gray, that it is OK to feel what we are feeling. He delivers this in such a comforting way that, without ever saying it directly, he is reassuring us. He is telling us that this, too, shall pass. That we should go about our day.

Because it will probably burn off by two PM.

xAP