The Wind Discomfits Me
“The wind blows where it wills…”
This is one of those phrases that many of us know from somewhere; in an earlier time maybe it was something learned as a child, in school perhaps. I thought it might be from a poem — Wordsworth, perhaps.
But no, it’s from the Christian bible: John 3:8. I saw it had various translations: “where it wishes” was the most common phrasing, although I’d learned it as “where it wills.” Different translation; not important now. I never did know the rest of the verse, and that’s not important, anyway, to what I’m writing here.
I’m writing about the wind because it is making me mad. Not as in “angry,” but the earlier meaning: Crazed. “At ends.” Something I can do nothing about. I should write “another thing I can do nothing about.” It seems now that those are most things. Most things I can do nothing about anymore.
One of these days I’m going to buckle down and write here about something I’ve come to call “inagency.” It’s how things mostly are today: things we can do nothing about.
Of course the weather (and wind is part of what we call “weather” ) is something we all know we can do nothing about. Mark Twain had a famous quip about that: I’ll let you look that one up yourself.
Yet like so many things, this is no longer true. That is, we convince ourselves it is not true, because now we, sapiens, can “fix” anything, we believe. Including, at long last, the weather. This is the belief driving a section of the climate-denying cabal: global warming isn’t real, but if it is, we can fix it anyway. The latest volley from this group, I saw recently, was the plan to stick some form of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect the sun away from the earth. “Solar geoengineering,” it’s called.
I remember first reading about this in Elizabeth Kolbert’s follow-up book to The Sixth Extinction, titled Under A White Sky. It occurred to me when I read it that Kolbert had deliberately chosen the most bizarre outlandish proposal to “deal with” “climate change” and so wrote about this concept, which one reviewer described as “praying light-reflective particles into the atmosphere” which would “make blue skies look white.” Kolbert’s book was published in 2021.
And now here we are.
“Momentum around solar geoengineering is building fast,” ran an article in The New York Times in March, 2024, just as I was putting together this piece about the wind. Written by Jeremy Freeman, director of CarbonPlan, “a climate research nonprofit,” the article went on to describe the latest hare-brained ideas. “The most discussed approach involves spraying tiny particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet,” he wrote. “Other proposals include injecting sea salt into clouds to increase their reflectivity or using giant space parasols to block the sun.” (Free link to article.)
The horrors that would likely result from geoengineering were outlined clearly enough in a Times article a year earlier, “My Continent Is Not Your Giant Climate Laboratory,” by Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke of the Center for Climate Change and Development at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria. (Free link to article.)
I could continue down this path but it is somewhat afield of what I really want to examine here, which is the effect of wind on sapiens. By “effect” I mostly mean “emotional effect.” And the examination I’ve been conducting is not at all scientific, by which I mean it’s not based on any number of subjects: it’s based on me. And perhaps on the animals I see around me in my back yard.
Wind seems to put people “at ends” — which is a term my mother always used — not sure anyone else uses it — but it means being restles, unable to settle, discomfited. Sort of worrried-lurking-in-the-background.
Today the wind is high. As I sit writing this, I can hear it gusting around the chimney, the windows. But then, almost every day now the wind is high. We used to live in the South, but this part of the South seems to have become more like the Great Plains — as I understand them to be: I have never lived anywhere else than here — but the wind now blows pretty incessantly. That is to say, it is a rare day when the wind is not constantly blowing. If we are lucky it is just a “breeze,” which I learn (from the helpful Beaufort scale included on my weather app) is a wind between 7 and 11 miles per hour. Today the prediction is for winds up to 45 mph, which Beaufort classifies as a “gale.”
The wind puts people ‘at ends.’
But perhaps it doesn’t make much difference — 11 or 45. It is discomfiting. It is constant. There is no reprieve.
Today, again, I will stay inside rather than where I would like to be, which is working in my garden.
I have a friend who grew up in South Dakota who is more used to the wind. She takes it for granted. She says it doesn’t bother her; she’s used ro it. And I do believe where one grows up is significant. Although people move around constantly and don’t seem to notice, I find myself always thinking of the Somali, Ethiopian and Vietnamese immigrants all living in cold Minneapolis. Does it bother them to not live in the warm places where they grew up? ? Would living in the places they grew up in bother them more? That is always the question, I guess. Which is worse? Which is better?
I find it hard to work outside, and this time of year I really need to be working outside — planting the leafy green vegetables, removing mulch, moving plants But I resist going out. The wind would not actually impede this kind of work; ,y problem, I know, is psychological. I do not like a constant wind.
I know that the amount of wind that blows through this region has changed. I am convinced of it. But I do not see articles about it, and when I mention it to others they often shrug if off or tell me they have not noticed it that much. How can that be? Am I so much more sensitive to the wind? I do know that the weather forecasts on my app almost constantly now contain “wind advisories” — and didn’t used to. Is that because the wind is stronger, or because someone decided to add a feature to the app? Today there are too many moving parts to figure much out with any certainly. Or it might just be me.
I’ve read that the Jet Stream has changed due to the warming of the planet. On some websites I read that it has gotten stronger. Other studies say it has gotten “lazier.” It has “moved poleward,” I also read; this is causing cooler weather to pour down from the Pole.
Has the Jet Stream caused more cold air to constantly move down what used to be considered the South (or least the northern part of the South where I live)? It’s hard for me to tell, to sort out what seems to be conflicting information. And I don’t hear much about it anywhere.
But to me the weather where I live now seems to be more like what I’ve always understood the midwest to be.
And I also know this about myself: that the large psychological element of my aversion to the wind, my depression about it, is related to knowing that it heralds a basic change caused by the planet changing, growing hotter. Somehow, ironically, this has caused global air movement to make our area, paradoxically, cooler.
I grew up in the warm and humid air, and “warm and humid” comforts me. When others moan about the humidity, I sit under the trees and drink iced tea. Things grow well in humidity. I think of jungles longingly. We are losing jungles, of course.
I should rejoice: if things continue like this, we will remain one of the geographical areas that global warming has affected the least; many would say cooler is better. But it’s also drier. Don’t hear much about that, either; but I see it in the garden. Already in March I have set the sprinklers to work.
Many would welcome a cooler period. But I fear it. To me it’s a sign of what I’ve been able to pretty much ignore: we are destroying the biome we understand as “home.”
