What a Wondrous Thing Is the Wind
As if it were a cymbal next to my ear it woke me all at once.
Wind--the sound like no other, unmistakable. How can something that is, after all, only a basic whish , sound so authoritative, so ominous. A force, the sound of a force so wild, so strong, you get up to look out the window to see it.
You don’t of course. You see nothing but streets incredibly clean, as though they had been swept and swept again. You see young trees leaning and big trees bending. Bending--the huge camphor tree with a trunk as wide as a tank and branches thick as elephant legs. It takes a wind storm as strong as the Santa Ana to make you realize that those big trees are living things, growing, flexible.
A door squeaks, a low, continuing screech--no, it is not a door; it is the house, the whole wooden house, also flexible, straining against the wind.
To the window again. But how can this moving wall of wind, this thing as fierce, as potentially destructive as an army, this thing that howls and whistles and shreiks like a pack of coyotes, be so completely invisible? Why, it’s scarier than ghost ships or time warps or black holes in space. Space--that’s what it is, moving space, space you can’t see.
You can see, however, what that moving space has done. Those huge shells from the palm trees, lying everywhere like giant broken basketballs. You can’t help but collect a few to take home, at least I can’t, along with some of those fringy fronds; they’ll be sure to be the best fire starters ever to get a good fire going in the fireplace.
Well, they aren’t. They burn all right, but they’re all gone in about three seconds and utterly refuse to warm up at all to any of their neighboring wood pieces. Or maybe it’s the wood pieces that are being snobbish; at any rate the fire goes out right away.
The palm tree debris is kind of visually interesting, particularly if it’s not on your own property. But other things are not. Roof shingles, for instance. Why it is even more upsetting to see them tastefully decorating the tops of the tall hedge than to see them meekly resting on the ground I do not know, but it is. It’s sort of as though the wind was showing off-- Here , it says, I can do anything I want to. I don’t care what you want. See, I can throw these shingles any old way--up, down, halfway through the hedge, see? Maybe next time, if I’ve a mind to, I’ll do the same thing with a rafter or two--how’d you like that?
The wind is a wild tiger you hear moving in the jungle but can’t see; the least rustle means hidden power, danger. And excitement, you’ve got to give the Santa Ana that--there’s energy, an energy we can’t control or see but have to hear and feel, an energy that diminishes us, but gloriously, the same way as looking at the stars.
