Creek Running North 大自然 The wind

April 11, 2006

The wind

She told me once the wind was her ally. Why then did it scrape me clean of her today? One gust near drove me into the bridge wall this morning, laughing. Was it me laughing, or the wind?

Red-shouldered hawk buffeted near my house. Slabs of cardboard fifty feet in the air, and spinning: new storm coming in a season of storms. White patches flashed at wingtips: hawk spun in spirals not three feet wide, flipped, and again like a flicked wrist. She relented, let the wind carry her to the bay, gone before her afterimage faded.

Three hundred feet above the bay, a bit of paper crossed the bridge: blew in from the south and through the bridge cables, ten feet above us and out the other side. At work I wrote a note to a friend: “There is an energy in the air.” I hit “send” and the power went out. Pelted with rain on streetside: a small flash flood sweeps cigarettes toward the Pyramid. Joy and joy. And a week from now I am in the desert, where storm means more even than this.

Posted by: Chris Clarke

Categories:
Travel
The Neighborhood

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Nice raven logo addition Chris. Kangi tanka in Lakota, wise in ways to survive and endure even in the harshest of conditions. The damn winds; too bad they don’t let you stop on the bridge to listen to the moaning and shrieking of the wind through the girders and the cables. It is the most amazing and scary of sounds.

The highest (and i mean that in every sense) point in South Dakota is the main radio tower atop Cement Ridge (the highest ledge) of the Black Hills. The view from there is beyond the imagination and capacity to describe with any accuracy, but try to conceive of seeing five large US plains states spread out before you, two hundred miles to the west are the Big Horns, the Laramies to the southwest, Devils Tower to the north/northwest, Bear Butte to the north east, the spine of the black hills you are straddling and so forth.

But it isn’t the view that makes it a powerful experience, it is the winds; the: unrelenting howling, shrieking, yelling, moaning, groaning, pestering, blistering, and-and-and, winds. It would be such an easy climb if it weren’t for the winds; it is life threatening because of them. The reward for challenging takuskanskan is great and good when you make it.

1
By: spyder
on April 11, 2006
at 08:07 PM