Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [2]
It was a long time ago, but at that instant for that child and the man he became, wind indeed became personal, a thing, capricious and malevolent, to be treated with the utmost caution and constant suspicion. I learned that unless you are very careful, wind can kill. And sometimes it will kill even when you take the most meticulous care. I learned that wind is perpetual, persistent, present even in its absence, in that sense, eternal. Wind has many disguises, is capable of many definitions. And possesses many talents, some of them cruel.
Path of Hurricane Ivan in the Atlantic Basin. The thickest portions of the track are the points at which Ivan reached Category 5 status, the most powerful.
For years afterward, I was watchful, wary even of the gentlest seaside breezes. And now, perversely, I live on the Atlantic coast, in the teeth of the North Atlantic gales and in the ominous eye of the hurricane path. And of course, I'm still wary.
For some decades after my traumatic morning in Cape Town I lived mostly in cities, where I barely noticed the weather or the wind. Modern city people generally don't, I think. Weather is an occasional nuisance, but not something that affects life. Torrential rains come once or twice a year, occasional blizzards bring traffic to a crawl, gales can shake buildings and bring down trees, but really all you have to do is wait indoors for a while and it will all go away. True, heat waves and droughts are weather too, and if they persist and the water is rationed, they can seem alarming, but in the big cities of the developed world we have derived the reassuring notion that someone, from somewhere, will come along to fix it. Someone always does, if enough people grumble loudly enough. Even damage from the great northeast ice storm of 1998, which shut down power for millions of people in the dead of winter, was fixed after a while. People hunkered down and waited it out. Exceptions to this general obliviousness can be found, among them emergency workers, who must risk any weather to rescue the fools and punish the knaves who have ventured into it, and long-distance truckers, for whom weather is reduced to what bad weather perpetrates on a constantly shifting five-hundred-mile strip of asphalt, but as a generality it is true enough.
On farms, in the country, in small villages, and on the shore, the perspective is very different. People in those places have a personal, visceral connection to the weather and the wind. On my grandfather's farm on the arid plains of South Africa, to take one such place, the summer heat would boil up into the sky when the rains failed, the air would prickle and crackle and you could see the dust storms coming in from the west, a massive wall of violent color. You knew you had an hour or so to prepare, to close the windows and batten the shutters, to get the animals into the barn if possible, and then the sky would go black, shot with violet and brown, and the sand would blast the fruit from the trees and the flowers in their beds. And when it was gone, the heat lifted for a brief while and there were little drifts of sand by the doors and gates and everything was gritty to the touch, precious topsoil turned to dust and used by the weather to abrade whatever had stood in its path.
These years were the worst, the drought years. People hated the weather, then. And the wind as its personification.
On the east coast of North America the attitude is different, but the same. From our house early in the mornings I can hear, and sometimes see, the fishing boats setting out from