Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [79]
That was as high as the classification system went.
I
One way of getting a feel for the force of the wind, as I found to my early sorrow, is to be seized by a gale and almost hurled into the ocean, there (the childish imagination working in overdrive) to be dashed to pieces on the rocks by waves the size of small mountains . . . But there are easier ways too, and occasions much more pleasant. You can stand, for example, on the pitching deck of a great sailing schooner in a heavy wind, several acres of mainsail billowing out above you, "taught and tight as the steel door of a safe," as actor Sterling Hayden once put it, the wind caught in a capacious cup of canvas to pull a hundred and more tons of vessel through the water at better than 10 knots, bending the massive mainmast almost beyond its tolerances. I once read how in 1780 a British man-of-war rounded the Horn in a gale strong enough to shred any vestige of canvas, and, desperate to turn the vessel, the captain sent a dozen men scuttling up the ratlines to the mainmast yardarms, there to act as a small scrap of clinging living canvas, tiny in relation to the size of the ship but enough, in that force of wind, to give the captain some purchase against the storm.1
Sometimes, if your mood is right, such winds can seem playful. When the wind is gusting to 80 and 90 miles an hour, scudding along a beach, you can go out into the gale, spread your coat into the wind, and bound down the sand in strides that are thirty and even forty feet long, without effort. (Gerry Forbes, head of Environment Canada's Sable Island Station, has done this many times as hurricanes have passed by. "Of course," he says, "you then have to crawl back.")2 At 120 miles an hour, the wind equals the earth's gravitational force, and then you will fly, whether you want to or not. Antarctic explorer Paul Doherty remembers how in a gale station staff would amuse themselves by going out into the hurricane-force winds, facing downwind, and then leaning backward, "leaning on the wind," at angles of 40 or 45 degrees. If someone then creeps up behind you and steals your wind, you'll fall flat on your back. "[A geologist] did this to me twice before I figured out what was going on," he writes. The first year he was at McMurdo Station on Ross Island, Doherty recalls, there was an iceberg one hundred miles long by twenty miles wide, "just about the size of the San Francisco peninsula." It stretched 1,500 feet down into the ocean, but the wind "pushed so hard on [the] . . . iceberg that it rotated around like the hour hand on a clock running backward."3
Great winds have their effects on the landscape too, not just on its inhabitants. I've seen the effects of aeolian erosion, which is what the geologists call sandblasting, in the Sahara Desert. Whole mountains have been stripped by the winds into grotesque castles, some of them with spires a thousand feet tall. Entire mountain chains heaved into being by tectonic shifting are reduced to dunes in the scouring winds. It's possible that the shape of the great pyramids of Egypt was inspired by natural erosion in the Western Desert. Geologist Farouk El-Baz has found that a pyramidal shape best resists erosion because it directs the wind smoothly upward, as does the prow of a boat, so natural pyramidal hills came to stand as a symbol of eternity. If the pyramids had been cubed, they would have disappeared millennia ago.4
Power and telephone companies in desert areas have to protect the lowest few feet of their wooden poles—the poles of the trans-Caspian phone lines lost half their diameter in a decade. On a tiny scale, I've seen a glass bottle carelessly discarded