elizabethlevett

Wild is the wind.

It certainly is. Sometimes.

I love it. I hate it. A lot of the time I hate the wind.

It’s just too windy.

A few days ago I had plans to hike with a friend. The wind picked up fierce and cold. She begged off. Said the wind was too strong for her, too cold. She was wearing a fleece indoors. I walked through the park on my own, grateful for my wool hat and the cover of trees, wary for branches that might blow down at any time and land on my head.

The wind can be violent and disquieting. It whistles through the cracks in our house and moans down people’s chimneys or whines at the window, providing a perfect soundtrack for scary movies, the kind that take place in an old dark house. Even cats don’t like the wind and cats know things.

In Southern California I remember the hot, abrasive Santa Ana winds. In August sometimes the dry and evil wind whips up fires, blows away all your paper plates. It ruins young shrubs and just generally goes around making waves. Joan Didion called this time the season “of suicide, divorce, and prickly dread.” It makes you uneasy. Makes you “hang your head over, hear the wind blow.”

And wild is the wind as David Bowie said. Years ago I worked in an office on Market Street around Ninth. The wind would blow so hard around Fox Plaza that short people and children sometimes felt like holding onto a stop sign or light pole to avoid being blown away like Dorothy’s house. My friend Meri would walk into the office, her cheeks reddened, her hair disarranged, and say, “Stop this wind! STOP this wind.” In Chinese medicine the wind is associated with anger and the sound of shouting. But you can’t do any good yelling at the wind. “The wind does not hear. The wind can not hear.” It seems so brutal.

And yet. And yet.

When the winds don’t blow in this coastal city, something is very wrong. When the fires came like they did this past year, the wind becomes a subject we all talk about. For days the air was sickly yellow and thick with ash, the ashes of loss. We walked around in the eerie light with masks on and even little kids couldn’t go play outside. I checked the online weather constantly and stared unbelieving at the satellite images of a stubborn high-pressure trough sitting over us for days and days.

But there was an end. The wind came and then the rain, and then the fog, the blessed fog. “…that part of the wind that we all long for sometimes.” A sweet chill blew things clear and brought the consecrating moisture and lovely negative ions to calm things down.

The wind can be scary, but it’s a good scary, like an old dark house movie. The wind blows. The rain comes, or the fog, and we go to sleep. The air is sweet again in the morning.

“For we are creatures of the wind.”

(Thanks and acknowledgement for some favorite wind lyrics from David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, and King Crimson.)