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Before I can get to the song and its lying lyricist, I have to take you on a little side trip down the genre of adult contemporary music of the 1970s.

In 1977 Debby Boone daughter, of Pat Boone, (kids, you’ll need to skip your parents and go straight to your grandparents to ask about him) released the chart-topping song You Light Up My Life, written by Joe Brooks. The song held for 10 weeks at number one on the charts helping propel Debby Boone to a Grammy for Best New Artist. The next year she followed up her tremendous success with the song California, also by Brooks. This time the tune languished, never rising above 50 on Billboard’s Hot 100, relegating Miss Boone to being the subject of Trivial Pursuit questions; but hang on to that second swing for the top of the charts because it utters the lie that has stayed with me since my move to California 44 years ago.

For the past several days Southern California, including San Diego, has suffered terribly high, unseasonable temperatures, breaking records as we have reached triple digits in early October. What has brought the baking environment is a weather condition which popular myth erroneously asserts is named after the famed Mexican military commander Santa Anna, but is really more tied to the name of the mountain range, a Santa Ana.

Driven by high pressure out Nevada way, Santa Ana wind come over the inland mountains to the east, drops from high altitudes to sea level and blows hard toward the ocean. Following the ideal gas law, the air, as it compresses to sea level pressures, rapidly rises in temperature, creating the hot, very dry, and strong winds of the Santa Ana, which are not unlike having a blast furnace blowing directly into your face.

Now, we come back to Joe Brooks, a New York native who apparently never lived in the subject of his song, California. In 1978, living in the soggy wet heat of Florida, I listened to Debby Boone singing about that distant and near-mythical state of California. (Yes, as a teenager in the 70s, I listened to Adult Contemporary radio; there is a reason I never went to a prom.) She possessed a pleasant voice, used it well, and if one set aside her overt evangelistic religiosity her music suited me just fine. Now, almost 50 years later, fragments of the melody for California remain in my head, but one line, the lie written by Joe Brooks and voiced by Debby Boone, echoes in my skull.

Where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong …

Belong? Belong where? Hell? Dante’s Inferno?

For over 40 years I have lived in San Diego, experiencing winter storms that tore away large piers, earthquakes that made the wall of a Denny’s ripple like wind-driven water, and blindingly bright and hot summers, but never once during a Santa Ana did I feel like I belonged. I have a quite intense memory of riding my motorcycle east on I-8, directly into Santa Ana winds, with the sensation that my face was being cooked off of my skull. The past week has been a more tolerable Santa Ana, not because the weather condition is any more pleasant but because I now live and work in air-conditioned comfort.

Mr. Brooks, the phrase may have solved meter issues you struggled with in the song California, but it is also a near-Platonic ideal of the expression that one should ‘know what you write.’