Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [9]
On the northern side of the Mediterranean, especially around Greece, an even worse wind is the gregale, which blows from the northeast. "It was a gregale that drove Saint Paul from Crete to Malta in the Acts, and another that so undiplomatically interrupted a summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush."17
I haven't yet named the winds that swirl around our house, though they have personality enough. Perhaps I have yet to understand them properly. Perhaps they are not steady enough. Or rather, they are steady but too variable to take real shape. We had a local blacksmith make up a weathervane for us in the shape of a codfish, which we call Wanda, and yesterday Wanda started the morning in the southeast, swung to southwest by noon, and by midafternoon was pointing northwest. All in all, a fairly typical day—ocean breezes, land breezes, fronts drifting in from the west, disturbances coming up from what are still called "the Boston states" around here.
When the winds are southwest, they blow straight across the bay, heaping the water up in front of them. That's when the massive waves crash on the rocks with a sense-obliterating roar.
You can find this exhilarating, or you can find it intimidating. It depends partly on mood, but also partly on physiology, for winds can radically alter the body's heat-exchange devices, increase evaporation, and affect surface circulation of the blood; when they reach above about 12 miles an hour, almost everyone finds some discomfort. A number of scientific studies have suggested that human bodies are hardwired to the weather and that we are sensitive to shifts in temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind speed, and barometric pressure.
No doubt it is possible to overcome this weather sensitivity and become inured to wind. If you're a sailor or a wind farmer—or a child with a kite—then doubtless psychology will trump physiology and you will find positives where others find only irritation.
This notion that winds affect health is hardly new. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote a treatise he called Airs, Waters and Places, in which he observed that "whoever wishes to pursue properly the science of medicine must first investigate the seasons of the year and what occurs in them"—as quoted in Smith's Southern Wind. He urged his fellows to notice that warm southerly winds gave people "a humid and piteous constitution, and their bellies [are] subject to frequent disorders, owing to the phlegm running down from the head; the forms of the body for the most part are rather flabby Women in such areas are prone to excessive menstruation, infants to convulsions, men to attacks of dysentery, diarrhea, and chronic fevers." For the unfortunates living in cities where west winds were common, the news was worse. People there were pale and enfeebled and subject to all the aforesaid diseases. North winds, for their part, induce "dullness of hearing, [and] if the wind prevails, coughs and infections . . . occur." Only about cities facing east could he be wholly positive.18 In a Discover magazine article, Stephen Rosen's Weathering is quoted, listing a number of other eminent persons who believed that weather, and especially wind, was related to the body and controlled its humors—men of the world like Columbus, Charles Darwin, Ben Franklin, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, and Leonardo da Vinci.19
In more modern days, some scientists agree, sort of. Clinical psychologist John Westerfield has written that he'd seen a number of psychoses related to storm phobias. For a decade the German weather service has issued biometeorological bulletins like "cloudy with a chance of migraines and damp with a chance of insomnia." Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has conducted numerous biometric studies related to weather. The elderly, particularly, frequently cannot bring themselves to go outdoors because the wind makes them anxious.
The anxiety is worse when the winds are not just violent, but relentless too. In the dust bowl of the Dirty Thirties, a farmer's wife, Edna