The wind giveth and the wind taketh away - but we don’t want it to slow down.
The wind has been copping flack recently, and I feel bound to defend it. I heard Hurricane Melissa was the strongest storm in the world this year when it laid waste to Jamaica in late October, and last weekend Cyclone Fina gave Darwin a fright.
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That’s not the wind I’m referring to. I would start with a dog-friendly wind, which is like having a good newspaper dropped on your door step. That is, it tells you what you need to know right here and now, to make it through the day.
The wind tells me who is sizzling bacon in the neighbourhood, where the fox and hares have been heading overnight, and whether some dopy fisherman has abandoned a dying carp on the river bank for me to roll in.
(The Boss can’t understand that one. The rule is to never return a live carp to the river, but a dead carp back in the water is shrimp and yabbie food, and serves a useful purpose, whereas a dead carp left on the bank makes it unpleasant for everybody for two weeks. Except for me – let the truly stupid fisherman live, I say. But I digress.)
When the wind is on your side, it dances across the backyard, bringing gossip from other dogs, tempting aromas from campers and neighbours, and perhaps the promise of an upturned garage bin.
There’s the joy of a car ride with a nose out the open window too, which transcends a dog to a higher plane of esctasy - although The Boss tells me there’s a law against it now and reminds him of Alexander Woolcott’s lament that “all my pleasures are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.”
But as far as I know, there is no law against claiming that spot under the elms on a sweltering day, where the faint breeze caresses the fur so gently as to lull an old dog off to peaceful slumber.
Melissa and Fina reminded us that the wind is a complicated mistress, of course, and can wreak a terrible vengeance. Simon Winchester’s new book, TheBreath of The Gods, reminds us that it all starts with warm tropical air rising and and moving north and south to towards the poles, so that cool air must move in to fill the void. And it can change history.
He argues it was a warm spring breeze that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1986, unusual south-easterly winds bearing radioactive particles were all that alerted the world to the Chernobyl disaster, which the Soviets had said nothing about. The normal prevailing westerlies would have swept the radiation east to Siberia.
Mikhail Gorbachov eventually admitted that Chernobyl triggered the events leading to the collapse of the federation, five years later.
And it was a sudden westerly wind that helped destroy the Spanish Armada in 1588 — probably saving Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant countrymen from conquest by the Catholic King Philip II.
So what’s the wind up to? “Gales seem to be blowing where they ought not to,” Winchester writes, “and are ceasing to blow where for centuries past they always have.” The latter is the trend known as the “Great Stilling” – meteorologists have noticed that, for the first 15 years of this century, average wind speeds around the globe were 10% less than previously.
There is much debate about that because it feels like cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes are increasing in intensity.
Of course, life would be tedious without the wind. Winchester points out that “the doldrums,” the windless calm which has long frustrated sailors in tropical waters comes from the Dutch word for dull, or sluggish.
The Boss isn’t as keen on the wind as I am. He recalls an old fishing guide once urging him to “make the wind your friend” while he was battling to cast into a 30-knot breeze. He says he’s still working on it. Woof!
Simon Winchester’s fascinating book on how winds affect us is a compelling read.
