It was a cool morning in early November.  I was following a ridgeline in Harriman State Park, moving through open forest and across grassy knolls, sauntering easy and cheerful as the morning sun set the oak forest glowing in colors of tawny ocher and burnt orange — when suddenly the wind picked up.  It rolled in from the west without warning, jostled treetops, roared like a jet plane.  I zipped my jacket tighter, recognizing in the rough gusts the angry sound of winter.

That evening, I was chatting with my friend Stash Rusin, who’d recently climbed Cornell Mountain in the Catskills on a cold fall day, the sky overcast, the ground at elevation already dusted with snow as light as sugar frosting, although surprisingly no ice.  From the summit, he looked south, but a squall had pushed into the valley and blocked the mountain views.  He made his way through the woods to the north side of the summit and found himself in the middle of a maelstrom.  “The winds were 30-40-50 mph,” he recalled.  They made him feel “so excited – so alive.”

The wind is constantly on my mind.  Even when I’m inside, because my bedroom faces north, and my bed is by the window, and following the advice of Walt Whitman, I leave the sash open, all year long.  In a series published in 1858 under the quaint title “Manly Health and Training, Whitman advocated for plenty of outdoors exercise, described fresh air as the “great antiseptic,” cautioned against lifestyles rooted in the indoors.  So now, I’m leaned back against pillow, peering out the open bedroom window, listening to the wind gathering in the maples on the slope across the creek and watching as the slender branches sway back and forth – when suddenly a big gust barrels in.  How the branches twist and thrash!  Now the wind leaps across the creek and grapples with the Norway Spruce next to the house; the long limbs bob and weave and toss the dangling branchlets in strange hieroglyphic patterns.  Then a puff of air pushes in through the open window and brushes across my face.

I wonder if there is a language of the wind.  I wonder if every gust or eddy might represent a thought, whose meaning could be divined from the geometry of leaves in motion.  Surely the wind is part of the book of nature, which John Burroughs described as having pages written over in many different languages, “interlined and cross-lined,” full of notes in the margin.

Last summer I climbed Mt. Tsoodził in New Mexcio, one of four Navajo sacred peaks, wondering if I might encounter some of the Navajo Holy People (Diyin Dine’é) at the top.  I hiked in through a forest of spruce and quaking aspen, recalled the story of the Navajo wind spirit Níłchʼi, who is supposed to give advice to those who keep an open ear.  I emerged from the forest and began to scale a steep grassy slope toward the summit ridge, when I caught the sound of wind slicing through spruce needles.  I interpreted this as advice to step carefully and keep moving.  On the way down, as gray clouds gathered behind the summit, a single crack of thunder rang out.  Now the fluttering aspen leaves seemed to say, don’t tarry at elevation when a storm is brewing.

On the slopes of Mount Ktaadn, Thoreau reported that “aërial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire, and dispersing the embers about. It was as if we lay in the very nest of a young whirlwind.”  I experienced a similar phenomenon on the saddle between Blackhead and Black Dome in the Catskills on a weird warm February afternoon with a winter storm inbound.  The wind was raging overhead as I turned a corner on the trail – and suddenly a gust tore across the path no more than 20 feet in front of me, clutched the trees and shook them violently as if trying to uproot them. Where I stood, only a gentle ripple touched my cheek.

During an August afternoon on Windham, I stopped to watch the raptors floating in the currents, while in the distance a sail plane turned in lazy ovals.  At first glance the clouds seemed to be moving across the sky in a purposeful and deliberate manner, as unyielding as the prevailing wind. But when I stared closely and long enough, it turned out the clouds were tumbling, expanding, extending, breaking apart, coalescing.

Once I stood on the summit of Wittenberg in the evening, taking in a view was as dark and boundless as the midnight sea. The wind slipped through the trees behind me, and I heard it off to one side, as if a serpent of celestial girth was uncoiling from around the mountaintop and slithering off into the valley.

My theory is that we need the wind to stimulate our minds.  To stir our thoughts and let the important ones rise to consciousness.  Like one afternoon, when I was staring out my bedroom window at cloud shadows, dark and portentous, alternating with the bright light and rushing currents of spring, when a memory of Roy, my grandfather, came to mind.  When I was five or six, he took my hand and walked me out to the grove of woods behind his house, pointed to the trees, said “this is nature.” I remember the big grin on his face as he stripped off white t-shirt, struck a body builder’s pose, made his bicep muscles bulge and jump – how he made us laugh!  In later years, he’d lean back at the dinner table, letting others talk, listening, taking it all in, rarely speaking.  Now I am a grandfather.  Which is why these memories are important.

I explained to Stash that rough winds make me anxious.  I worry about staying warm.  About tree limbs falling.  About the chance of inbound weather that these rushing sounds portend.  I have an image in mind of our ancestors, in times well before the dawn of modern technology, living outdoors nearly naked but for scraps of animal skins, with little in the way of shelter but for sticks and ledges.  Weather would have meant risk of injury and exposure.  They would have kept an eye on the horizon at all times.

Storms can be devastating for all things living in the forest.  Violent winds knock down limbs, shatter trunks, uproot and topple trees.  Yet the forest evolved in the presence of wind.  The trees that best survived found the right balance between tensile strength and flexibility.  Which means that trees need the winds to stay supple.

Like the forest, we, too, evolved amid the winds, which means our brains are tuned to their presence.  Living indoors, in air-conditioned stasis, I fear that we grow stale.  That we stiffen in our attitudes and turn fragile.

Chasing the Grid is available on Amazon!