Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [120]
And all the while the wind howled over them, through them, against them. It was basically a warm wind, perhaps sixty or even sixty-five degrees. Leo found it impossible to judge its speed. Even though the cliffs in this area were low compared to those at Torrey Pines—about eighty feet tall rather than three hundred and fifty—that was still enough and more to block the terrific onshore flow and cause the wind to shoot up the cliffs and over them, so that a bit back from the edge it could be almost still, while right at the edge a blasting updraft was spiked by frequent gusts, like uppercuts from an invisible fist. Leo felt as if he could have leaned out over the edge and put out his arms and be held there at an angle—even jump and float down. Young windsurfers would probably be trying it soon, or surfers with their wetsuits altered to make them something like flying squirrels. Not that they would want to be in the water now. The sheer height of the whitewater surge against the cliffside was hard to believe, truly startling; bursts of spray regularly shot up into the wind and were whirled inland onto the already-drenched houses and people.
Leo got his wheelbarrow to the end of the plank road, and let a gang of people grasp his handles with him and help him tilt the stone out at the right place. After that he got out of the way and stood for a moment, watching people work. Restricted access to some of the weakest parts of the cliff meant that this was going to take days. Right now the rocks simply disappeared into the waves. No visible result whatsoever. “It’s like dropping rocks in the ocean,” he said to no one. The noise of the wind was terrific, a constant howl, like jets warming up for takeoff, interrupted by frequent invisible whacks on the ear. He could talk to himself without fear of being overheard, and did: a running narration of his day. His eyes watered in the wind, but that same wind tore the tears away and cleared his vision again and again.
This was purely a physical reaction to the gale; he was basically very happy to be there. Happy to have the distraction of the storm. A public disaster, a natural world event; it put everyone in the same boat, somehow. In a way it was even inspiring—not just the human response, but the storm itself. Wind as spirit. It felt uplifting. As if the wind had carried him off and out of his life.
Certainly it put things in a very different perspective. Losing a job, so what? How did that signify, really? The world was so vast and powerful. They were tiny things in it, like fleas, their problems the tiniest of flea perturbations.
So he returned to the dump truck and took another rock, and then focused on balancing the broken-edged thing at the front end of the wheelbarrow: turning it, keeping it on the flexing line of planks, shouldering into the blasts. Tipping a rock into the sea. Wonderful, really.
He was running the empty wheelbarrow back to the street when he saw Marta and Brian, getting out of Marta’s truck parked down at the end of the street. “Hey!” This was a nice surprise—they were not a couple, or even friends outside the lab, as far as Leo knew, and he had feared that with the lab shut down he would never see either of them again.
“Marta!” he bellowed happily. “Bri-man!”
“LEO!”
They were glad to see him. Marta ran up and gave him a hug. Brian did the same.
“How’s it going?” “How’s it going?”
They were jacked up by the storm and the chance to do something. No doubt it had been a long couple of weeks for them too, no work to go to, nothing to do. Well, they would have been out in the surf, or otherwise active.