This past Sunday was a hot day, and the coolness of the evening
was a welcome relief. The sun had set long ago and everyone in the
house was asleep. Though all the windows and doors were open, the
house was still warm, so I went out onto the deck. I leaned against
the railing, drinking in the cool black night.
This past Sunday was a hot day, and the coolness of the evening was a welcome relief. The sun had set long ago and everyone in the house was asleep. Though all the windows and doors were open, the house was still warm, so I went out onto the deck. I leaned against the railing, drinking in the cool black night.
Then, very distinctly, I felt a brief gentle rush of wind move up the valley and across my body. I don’t remember ever taking such clear notice of a single push of wind, but it was as if it blew in response to my arrival – a kind of hello from the night. Winds are usually steady and persistent. This breeze came out of the stillness in a distinct puff and then moved on. I had been outside all day, and I could not recall one breath of wind before that one.
I usually think of the wind in negative terms. A steady wind in the heat of summer is like fingernails on a blackboard – it grates on you. If I spend a full day outside in a heavy wind, by dinnertime, I feel like I have gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. But Sunday evening, the wind’s touch was a soft caress that stirred my mind in the way that an old song reminds one of a particular time long past.
If you enjoy reading nature writers, you know that it is a genre that can be cripplingly dull. But when it is well done, it can be exhilarating. John Muir can do that. I am convinced that, for him, a day in the wild was as exciting as a day at Disneyland is for and 8-year old.
I came off of the deck and searched my books for Muir’s story, ”A Wind-Storm in the Forests.” It tells of a day from which any one of us would have sought refuge indoors. But not Muir. Quite the opposite.
In December 1874, Muir was exploring a tributary of the Yuba River in the midst of a furious windstorm. ”The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots,” Muir described, adding, ”I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes, some uprooted.”
Rather than turn away from the tumult, Muir, as he always did, embraced it.
”Nature has always something rare to show us,” he wrote, and he went to see the day’s offing. He chose a fairly young, 100-foot-high Douglas Fir and climbed to the top.
”The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced … In the widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees…”
Take the thrill of riding Great America’s Vortex and square it. Take the danger and cube it. And not just for 90 seconds.
”I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”
I’d never admit it over a beer with the boys, but this guy was cool, finding such pure joy riding a windy tree-top.
He concluded, ”We all travel the milky way together, trees and men. They make journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings – many of them not so much.”
Maybe it was from reading this passage so many times over the years that I was able to connect with that Sunday night gust. I smelled summer in it. I wondered what had pushed the only movement of air I had felt all day. Where did it originate, and where would it dissolve in an eddy?
