The Wind

Where I live, the wind blows. And blows. And blows. And blows. The Great Plains of the American West is a large area consisting primarily of grass lands. The traditional forested area of the Continental United States, the great deciduous forests, was primarily situated east of the Mississippi River, and they play out a relatively short distance west of its western bank. From there to the Rocky Mountains is the area known as the Great Plains.

Large herds of bison, the American buffalo, migrated over these plains, moving where the grazing took them. Infrequent water holes, creeks and rivers imbedded in their genetic memory, they survived the great climatic changes that wiped out so many other giant omnivores. And, they survived the great carnivores which reigned over the continent in prehistoric times. For at least 10,000 years, nomadic people walked these plains, following the bison which they used for food, clothing and shelter. From the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, a vast sea of grass, there were few trees or other natural breaks to prevent the blowing of the wind.

The things that cause the wind are the natural weather patterns. There are other areas on the globe which have windy conditions as well, and they probably have their own unique conditions also. On the Great Plains, the Arctic weather moves unchecked down across the plains in Canada, gains momentum and moves, sometimes with violence, down through the United States. This cold, dry air meets with the warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, the combined form being pushed by the natural flow of weather patterns from the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Coast, and when the two weather patterns meet their union can cause violent turbulence which creates the wind.

When my mother was in her late 70s, I, who was at the time in my 50s, asked her when one gets used to the wind around here. Her reply was a simple, “You never get used to it.” She had endured it all those years and, now, so have I. She lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, a child coming of age in the heart of the Dust Bowl. She had experienced not only the wind, but the wind carrying with it the dirt and dust and topsoil of a multi-state area. One dust storm originating in Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas swept south through Oklahoma and moved from there, curling in an eastward direction, and made it all the way to the Eastern Seaboard. Dust and soil from the Great Plains had traveled over 2,000 miles on that day’s journey.

When she was young, it wasn’t just the wind. It was the wind and the dust, the choking, killing dust. And the constant blowing of the wind had caused more than one person to literally go crazy. I have seen similar dirt storms in the 1950s. They weren’t nearly so bad as what people endured twenty years earlier, but those kids who had endured the winds and the dust of the ‘30s were now the adults, responsible for their own safety and survival and that of their children as well. Remembering the earlier days of devastation, they were frightened at the prospect of a new round of dust bowl days. Schools closed and they sent us home where we weathered the storms the same way our parents had when they were young.

The wind was blowing this week. Thirty miles per hour, it was a balmy day for around here. At forty to fifty miles per hour things were blowing. My son and I were mowing our yard with riding mowers, a dirty job. And, behind our place was an eighty acre field a farmer was plowing with heavy equipment, trying to turn some moist earth up to the top in an effort to hold it and prevent it from blowing away.

Years ago, a friend of mine moved to Oklahoma from Memphis. He told me to never complain about the wind. He claimed the wind cleansed the air. Later, I drove my family from Oklahoma to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. About one hundred miles west of St. Louis, we picked up a smog, the likes of which I had never seen before. We crossed the Mississippi River and the smog stayed with us. It was industrial smog which made breathing difficult. My sinuses burned, my eyes burned and my lungs burned. The sun was blocked from view and the sky was a darkened, ugly gray. There was no wind and the particles in the air hung heavy on us and in us. The haze collected in our lungs. We drove on to Indianapolis where we spent the night. It was difficult to sleep because breathing was labored. The haze followed us to Detroit were we spent a couple of days visiting relatives. As we drove out of Detroit, making our way to the Mackinaw Bridge, we were still under its dark and ominous cast. We finally drove out from under the haze two to three hundred miles north of Detroit. “Don’t ever complain about the wind,” my friend had said, “it cleans the air.”