LUMBERYARD LOGS: Searching for signs of winter

A lot of us here in Laguna — actually, in all of Southern California — get a kick out of gloating when the weather turns frigid in the north, Midwest and East Coast.

Around this time of year, you start to hear this a lot, especially from our TV weathercasters. One week after we’re all petrified of raging wildfires, our weather people are smirking that it’s a comfy 75 degrees in most of the Southland, while the East Coast is slipping on ice and the Midwest is already digging out with snowplows.

Is it really wise to throw up our temperatures at the rest of the country — especially when we are prone to fires, floods, earthquakes and mudslides?

I’m convinced that’s why we get so much flak from snarky, die-hard New Yorkers like Woody Allen, who once famously said the only good thing about L.A. is being able to turn right on red. (Now they can turn right on red in most of the East, too, so he’s had to retire that crack.)

Allen wasn’t talking directly about the weather, of course. He’s much too clever for that. He and others from the Big Apple (and who knows, maybe Chicago and Cleveland, and why not Philadelphia, too) like to joke about our state as a cultural wasteland — clearly a bogus charge.

We know the true impetus for these crass remarks — it’s not the fact that we have a place called “Tinseltown” in our midst — it’s the weather they have to endure while we sit pretty through the worst of it.

And it’s bad out there. Take it from me, who grew up in the Midwest — 20 below one year — and on the eastern seaboard, where your hands and toes go numb shortly after the New Year’s bubbly wears off and don’t get their feeling back until St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a reason for L.L. Bean!

As a college student in Vermont, I learned to drive through snowpacks the way Laguna kids learn to surf. And it’s a lot like surfing. It’s a skill that doesn’t leave you, a skill honed in the dead of a blustery night or on a country road in the middle of a blizzard with family on board. It’s life-or-death.

So I’m sympathetic to the anti-Left Coast sentiments from family and friends who are ice-bound. And since I chose to escape the ice and snow I simply smile to myself and count my blessings — and my wisdom.

I especially feel for my brother who lives in Virginia, where it gets cold enough to thoroughly chill you but rarely snows. A dry, dull cold is somehow worse than a snowy one. It’s winter without the wintry charm.

Here, of course, as our weather-people would gleefully point out, we enjoy the best of both worlds: We can look at snow-covered distant mountains while cruising around under palm trees in a convertible with the top down. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Sometimes it’s not easy to remember that it’s winter here. There are no obvious signs of it. The hibiscus and bougainvillea still flower; people still wear T-shirts and flip-flops. You can still get a sunburn.

You have to watch for subtle clues that the season has changed — a skill that comes only after years of living here.

If you’re from a place where the seasons knock you over, the sameness can be monotonous, boring. It’s virtually unnoticeable.

Thanksgiving — which can easily have a hot Santa Ana wind — can be murder if you’re tending a big turkey in the oven for four to six hours. For years, Christmas didn’t feel like Christmas to me. New Year’s was just another day.

It takes a keen eye to recognize the changes. The biggest shock is when daylight saving time ends, and we are suddenly plunged into darkness in the middle of the afternoon. That’s an obvious sign, but it happens most everywhere else, too.

But there are others, specific to this location, if you keep an eye out.

For instance, you know it’s winter in Laguna when the little nursery on Laguna Canyon Road near the dog park puts out its “closing sale” sign. It’s not really going out of business, I’ve learned; it’s just going into hibernation for the winter. Like the crocuses, it’ll be back in the spring.

Other signs of winter:

The lifeguard towers disappear in the coves, and the lifeguards all but disappear from the remaining towers.

The sun sets over the ocean and the colors are spectacular. This is the best time of year for viewing, which can make for a marvelous Christmas Eve or New Year’s Day tradition.

It’s either too hot or too cold, so you end up wearing two sets of clothing and lugging your coat everywhere.

You are shocked to see people still swimming in the ocean — people who evidently don’t realize winter comes to Southern California, too, and should be honored and enjoyed, not simply ignored.

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 494-2087 or cindy.frazier@latimes.com.