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By Root 406 0

is flat; the communities of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, which were in the center of the eye as it came ashore, are both low-lying, their protective dunes only a few yards high, much too small to fend off Ivan's twenty-foot storm surge. The sea either brushed the dunes aside and crashed into the houses and marinas beyond, battering them away, or pushed whole dunes into the communities, swamping them in a swirling miasma of sand and salt water. The Interstate 10 bridge near Pensacola collapsed at the height of the storm; dozens of small boats secured in their marinas were dashed half a mile inland; the Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo was destroyed, and among the animals flooded out of their homes was Chucky, a one-thousand-pound alligator, and eight of his friends. Two suburban swimming pools were found floating on the highway near Gulf Shores.

By the morning of September 16, 26 more people had died, 13 of them in Florida. More than a million people were without power in eight states. (Later it was estimated that another31 deaths were "indirectly" attributable to Ivan, including 6 in Canada, bringing the monster's death count to 123, and Ivan had spawned no fewer than 111 tornadoes acrossfive states, destroying thousands of homes.)

By the afternoon of the 17th, the last workday before the weekend, Ivan had—finally—dropped below hurricane strength and had been reclassified as a tropical storm, and then downgraded further to a tropical depression. But it continued to spin off tornadoes and thundercells, not so very different from those that were at its core almost three weeks earlier, all those thousands of miles away in the Sahara. Nine inches of rain dropped on Georgia, causing widespread flooding. In middle Tennessee, several communities were hit by winds of almost hurricane strength, downing trees and power lines. Highways near Lawrence burg were closed. In West Virginia, more than twenty-two counties qualified for federal disaster relief funds. Eight inches of rain fell across central Pennsylvania, and those residents who had managed to sleep found when they woke up that radio and TV stations were off the air, and hundreds of homes and cars were underwater. The village of Spring Mills was two or three feet under water. Dozens of rivers were between four and six feet above normal. (Many of the news reports, curiously, seemed more concerned that Schnitzel's Tavern in Bellefonte was under water. To outsiders this seemed a low-grade emergency, but no doubt Pennsylvanians believed differently.) Most of the Delaware River basin got half a dozen inches of rain in a few hours; the river and its tributaries, especially in the Catskill and Poconos mountains, swelled and overflowed. The main-stem Delaware river at Trenton, New Jersey, was at 2g8 percent of normal, the highest levels since the state got hit by back-to-back hurricanes in ig33. Several basin counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York were declared federal disaster areas, and also qualified for relief funds.

I

Over their long history, humans have learned to use the wind in two primary ways, for transportation (sailing) and for supplementing their own musculature (that is, for driving machinery), and have learned from the wind (or other creatures that use the wind) another by-now-indispensable technique: the art of flying.

But sailing has become a game, in modern times a trick for children or a diversion for wealthy adults. As for flying, we are in the air more than ever—but as much against or despite the wind as with it or for it. And for using the power of the wind? Windmills have come, have gone, and are once again beginning to fill our landscapes, albeit in different iterations and guises.

Many other creatures, with a history far longer than ours, have also learned to use the wind, often in astonishingly subtle and complex, if rather limited, ways. In the course of doing so, they utilized, in passing as it were, some of our most cherished technologies long before we did—indeed, long before we existed. Not just flight, but navigation devices, echolocation, the