Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [11]
Late in the summer of 2004 I talked to a couple of tornado chasers, who spent a good part of the supercell season in Kansas, hoping against hope to watch a tornado touch down close enough to feel. I was convinced that this was part of the same suicidal pathology that drove men and women to murder in the devil gales of the High Plains, but they would have none of it. It was just an adrenalin rush, they said, a high that comes from staring down one of nature's most awesome and destructive forces. They were impatient with what they saw as my senseless probing for deeper motive. For my part, I wasn't convinced by their bravado. I had just finished a novel by Paul Quarrington called Galveston, (Storm Chasers in the United States), which was about a collection of misfits whose greatest desire was to place themselves in the path of a Caribbean hurricane, and I thought I understood them better than they did themselves. Modern folk are supposed to be beyond this. In the old days, yes, weather was a grim and capricious dictator, as the BBC's Felicity James pointed out, quoting Penelope Lively's 1996 novel, Heat Wave. "But for the technologically literate, 20th century spectator, the weather is [supposed to be] an aesthetic diversion."24 I knew this was not so. My own obsession with watching the oversize blunderings of Atlantic hurricanes stemmed from the same source as the tornado chasers'. For those of us who were no longer religious, it was awe. And not a little fear.
The mystery of wind's all-powerful presence, then, is deep-seated in the human psyche. It is one of the oldest mysteries of all, almost as old in our reckoning as the miracle of the quickening of life and the awesome presence of the sun and the moon. Humans in all cultures have been wrestling with winds and their meaning from the beginning. Meteorology and astronomy are the oldest of sciences, and in some ways the history of science is the continuing struggle to understand weather and its carriers, the winds. As the story of Hurricane Ivan shows, even now in the age of terabyte computers and chaos-driven algorhythms, explanations are still unfolding.
CHAPTER TWO
Wind's Great Theater
Ivan's story: Air isn't yet wind. The atmosphere is only the theater in which wind presents itself, and air is only the stuff of which wind is made, and at first this thing that was taking place in the southern Sahara, this not-yet-even-pre-Ivan, was merely a matter of moving air masses, a ponderous vertical circulation of the unseen and unknown, in a place still far, far away.
Far away from us, at least. It was late summer, and we had visitors from Paris at our house. One balmy afternoon we went down to Beach Meadows Beach, as our local white sand crescent is called, and strolled along the tide line, looking for shells and signs of clams. Our friend Philippe called it uvotre petite paradis" (your little piece of paradise), and so it was, because the beach was empty and warm underfoot, and the sea glittered in the sun. There was no surf to speak of only small ripples in the water. There was a gentle breeze aloft, in which the gulls played.
But on that same day, half a world away in the Sahara Desert not far from Darfur and in a landscape alien and hostile even by Saharan standards, something altogether different was happening.
This was in the massif called Tibesti—"Tu," or rock, to its inhabitants, the Tubu. It is no small thing, covering about 300 miles northeast to southwest, and