When it Blows, it Blasts

Posted on January 23, 2006 in Adolescence Weather

The night is black, lights are out for just a second, the merest part of a day that a human being can perceive. Sickness tosses about. The pathogens are bits of rotted earth, twice broken down mountains, and yellow pollen. They get through the best-caulked cracks, drive into the tear ducts, up the nose, and over the eyes. The force that thrusts them into the condominiums runs at sixty or more miles an hour, strong enough to lift chairs off the Hatfield’s wooden decks and hurl them at the McCoys living across the street.

What is of the mountain falls off the mountain. Fast. What we swim through ever so effortlessly as we walk downstairs to get in the car or check the mail — that soft, weak-willed air — turns into a behemoth on thousands of depressurized legs rushing to get a drink from the sea. And we live right in its path.

I have written on this theme many times on this blog. The wind. The damned Santa Ana winds. The foehns run down the closed off streets, down the little avenue where we live which is turned at a right angle to the northwest, southeast running roads of the complex. If I go outside, they do more than mess up my hair. My face, my hands, and any part of my body where the psycho-breeze can run free become greased with a mud made of ground up mountain and sweat. Even in the house, where the fan blows more of a squall than the anorexic thunderstorm outside, we feel its effects as it charges the air with positive ions.

When I was younger, this wind could be a boy’s dream. They’d cancel PE, so we either got to remain in the locker room with the towel-snapping jocks or go outside. I often chose to go outside with my friends. We’d find a place just outside the low-flying jetstream and imagine ourselves like Scott in the Antarctic. The winds brought us adventure twice a year, a relief from lives spent sweating in classrooms listening to the bluster of teachers.

Oh the wind, the wind. It’s here now shaking the windows of our bivuoac, our Little America on the edge of the chaparral. I hate it for the dust and the pollen. I love it for its storied ability to tear down decks, overturn cars, and bring down trees.

Yet, just now, it has performed a smaller task. It has separated a piece of wire attached to another beneath a glass bell atop a telephone pole. The wire jumped around just a bit. The lights flickered. All that depended on the distant turnings of coal fired turbines and nuclear-pushed steam stopped. For just a moment. Then the wind reminded us of the chaparral, of the power that broke down mountains and laid down the grains of this fossil dune.

The Japanese wind god chases off a demon, doubtlessly afflicting him with sinus headaches, dry eyes, itchy skin, runny nose, and nausea.

Written last night during the dry storm. Severe weather reports indicate that it will continue until about 2 PM on Tuesday.