As the Wind Blows

"I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul." Remember that song, an oldie from the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens? I always liked that song, but I guess I never really paid much attention to the lyric. "The wind of my soul?" Really? I mean, I know it's a metaphor, but ... really? That's what you're going with?

The lyric popped into my head as I was heading down the bike trail this morning. Coincidentally, it was windy, but then again, it's always windy on the bike trail, particularly as it hugs the Hocking River around the lower campus of Ohio University. You don't ever seem to get a break on the direction of the wind either. No matter which way you're headed, there is it, right in your face. Maybe it's just the way I'm prone to look at things. I think it has something to do with the bowl-shaped valley that we're tucked into. The winds come down from the hills and just sort of swirl around looking for an exit.

This time of year the wind is filled with vegetation, pollen mostly. The honeysuckle in particular is sweet in the air, but it sends me running for tissues and antihistamine. Later in the summer when the rains ease up and the land begins to dry out—about time for the county fair—you'll get clay dust blowing across town. It will be especially bad on State Street this year where the orange cones are out and road crews are hard at it. By the time they finish in September, the students will have blown back into town and so too the fall rains, wetting the leaves and carrying the spores of any number of molds and fungi. The smell of wet leaves puts me in mind of my high school cross-country days. Our home course meandered through the South Jersey pine barrens on trails that had a thousand curves.

As I understand it, our olfactory organs are close to the memory centers of our brains and that's why scent is such a powerful memory trigger. As a kid I lived near the ocean in South Florida. There the winds carry the salt air. It's an odor that's hard to describe but you know it when you smell it. It hits you as you exit the airport, as soon as those automatic doors open and you step through the threshold into a sun that is always a bit brighter than you remember, bouncing off all those flat roofs and white stucco houses. My days in South Florida were all pre-automobile ownership, so I spent a lot of time cursing the winds that never ceased blowing up and down the Atlantic coast. It felt like someone shouting at you.

As I was cycling this morning, I was thinking about whether you could do an exhibit about the wind. Sailing and aerodynamics came immediately to mind. For centuries, sailors have been adept at manipulating the wind, from whichever direction, to power their vessels forward. Being a landlubber, I've never really understood how they do that. Windmills have also been used for centuries, mostly to grind grain although in recent years more and more you see those great high-tech white spinning wheels that generate electricity. A few years ago, Diane and I visited the historic Adriaan windmill in Haarlem in the Netherlands. It was much larger inside than it looked, four levels each one with its own stated purpose. Traditionally, the master of the windmill had occupied a position of status in the community. Over the centuries, the mill had been used to grind stone, tobacco, and grain. Now it mostly grinds tourists.

The Wright Brothers conducted a ton of experiments in North Carolina when they were developing their glider. They studied the movements of birds and built their own wind tunnel to understand how air flowed over and under the wings. I attended a kite festival at Kitty Hawk where they did some of their experiments. I remember seeing historical photographs of them camping on a wide, sandy and obviously very windy beach. We were staying in a big house with a fully equipped kitchen and a jacuzzi. I like our way better.

At NASA they study global air currents and create animations that, not unlike oceanic currents, show how atmospheric winds constantly circulate around our planet. They pick up dust particles in the Sahara Desert and deposit them in South America, where the nitrogen therein fertilizes the rain forest. Similarly, warm water evaporating off the coast of West Africa feeds the fierce winds that we experience in the Caribbean. On the pancake lands of Kansas and Oklahoma, you get a variation on that theme in the form of tornados as dry winds blowing east meet warm humid air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. I spent some time in the Flint Hills of Kansas. You could see the line of storms coming from miles away. It was at once mesmerizing and frightening. Residents there told us the winds never stopped. They were a constant companion on the prairie. It put me in mind of the Dust Bowl, of Woody Guthrie and the Okies making that long trek westward across drought devastated fields. Kansas still exhibits the artifacts of ghost towns and "quiet towns"—communities that still have residents but not enough to support a school. 

In Montana, I ascended Swiftcurrent Pass in Glacier National Park and was struck by the lush green forest down below us to the west, in contrast to the dry, rocky slopes that flattened into the Great Plains to the east. Climatologists call it a "rain shadow." The mountains stall the storms blowing in from the Pacific. They back up behind those tall rocky peaks, dumping rain on the western slopes and leaving the east parched and, that summer, scorched by wildfires. We experience a similar effect in Athens as the moist air rising from the Gulf backs up when it reaches the Appalachian Mountains.

In Wisconsin, they feel the bite of Arctic winds swooping down into the Great Lakes region usually with Santa. The thermometer dips below zero, and the hair in your nostrils freezes on the inhale. We used to call it "nose hair weather." You'd have to plug your car in at night if you expected it to start in the morning. The seat cushion wouldn't even crunch down when you got in. It was like sitting on a block of cement. 

In the Southwest where it is mountainous but the desert soil doesn't hold onto the heat, you feel the constant movement of hot and cold air up and down the slopes. The air flows downward in the mornings as the cooler night air descends into the valleys. But as the sun raises the temperature, the air flow reverses and the winds flow back uphill. It's like a temperature-driven teeter totter. We experience the same phenomenon in Athens, although perhaps less dramatically. If you watch the turkey vultures that daily ride the late afternoon thermals along the ridges, you'll see them slowly, effortlessly circling as they get a free lift from the rising warm air. They flap their wings to reach their desired elevation, then slowly circle downward, around and around, until they reach some elevation that tells them it's time to flap again. Turkey vultures have a huge olfactory bulb, much larger than other raptors. Like flying bloodhounds, they are one of the only raptors that hunt by smell rather than sight, which makes sense since mostly what they eat reeks of decay. It seems odd that they would be one of the only birds to develop that evolutionary trait. Imagine drawing that lot. "Well, Mr. V. we have some good news and bad news. On the bright side, we've given you a great wingspan and the ability to soar almost effortlessly. The bad news? Well ... the menu ... ugh ... your meals will be confined to dead, rotting carcasses. Oh, and we'll help you out by making your head bald to keep down the bacteria ... and you can pee on your feet to keep them clean." It's a hard knock life, I guess.

I wonder if songbirds are bothered at all by the wind. Obviously, a hard gust shaking the trees that hold your house can't be a welcome feature, but to watch them fly, they so deftly dart and dash over, under and around whatever obstacles present themselves, I can't imagine that the average breeze gives them even the slightest trepidation. What would that feel like—to be able to navigate so freely, so swiftly, and so weightlessly through the air? In the time that it takes me to stand up from my chair they can be down the slope and blocks away.

Some years back, we experienced what's called a derecho, a line of fast moving, powerful winds that mowed down trees from Ohio to D.C. It came just a few months after the boulder fell on our house. Looking up at the trees on the ridge as they bent over the cliff, I couldn't help but wonder what god we had offended. Thankfully, no trees followed the boulder's path. But hiking through the forest afterward, you'd see dozens of mature trees that, forced to bend too far and too rapidly, simply snapped. There's a metaphor for you! For weeks after, the Athens County fairgrounds hosted caravans of power trucks moving out into the hills daily to repair electrical lines. Some friends suffered without power for weeks. Others benefitted from firewood that lasted years. I guess that's the way the wind blows.