Windy Valley

When I was nine, we moved from the San Fernando Valley (yep, I was a “Valley Girl”) and into Simi Valley a few miles “over the hill,” as the locals refer to the trip through the Santa Susana Pass and back. Before the move, I had, of course, experienced the wind--light breezes catching my hair, packing up and leaving the beach early to avoid the late-afternoon sand swirl, blustery winter and fall storms--or so I thought. The truth is, and any Simi-ite will back me up on this, you have never experienced a windy day until you’ve tried to walk to school down Cochran. When you’re young and thin enough, you can literally lean back with all your weight and, if the Simi Valley winds are at your back, be held up or eddied along like a falling leaf. No lie. I have always heard that “Simi” means “windy valley,” and I whole-heartedly believe it, but I’ve never investigated until now--and, darn it, if the late ethnographer Janet Cameron doesn’t claim that “Simi” is Chumash for “valley of the winds.” There are the remains of Chumash settlements at the edges of the valley, and the description sure does fit, so maybe it’s the truth. But, verified or not, it is one of those legendary references that makes so much sense, no one is motivated to change public opinion otherwise. In Janet Craig’s Windy Day, Penny gets buffeted about a bit, I admit, but she doesn’t know what real wind is.

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