When Weather Becomes Personal
That’s how Marq de Villiers opens his latest book, “Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather” (2006, Jacobus Communications Corp.), with the recollection of his own, personal, harrowing childhood encounter with wind, told in the third person:
“(T)he winds seized a helpless child and knocked him down onto the grass, gratuitously, brutally, effortlessly. He struggled to his feet and yelled for help, but the gale snatched his breath away and blew it out to sea, stripping away the sound so no one could hear him, and the yell became a soundless scream âÂ?¦ In the grip of the gale, the child skidded across the grass until he landed with a crack against the metal railings that were all that prevented him from being hurled into the ocean âÂ?¦ It was there that my mother came, and fetched me away, and tried to still my terror with her beating heart.”
It’s the story of another, deadlier wind that de Villiers then uses as a thread to knit together one chapter after another: the story of Hurricane Ivan. In addition to being an historic storm – the only one to reach the maximum strength Category 5 three times in its lifespan – it was also one that, for me, illustrated de Villiers’ contention that we take ill winds personally. My family, pets and I evacuated our Florida Panhandle home on Tuesday, Sept. 14 – two days before Ivan . We spent a week in Birmingham, and returned to find our beach community shredded and swamped by Ivan. Until Katrina’s arrival in 2005, Ivan was the hurricane many people along the Gulf Coast took most personally.
De Villiers weaves a fascinating history of Ivan throughout, tracing the storm’s origins all the way back to a rainstorm in the Darfur region of Sudan in the spring of 2004:
“No one in the Sahel knew why it was raining, or, except for a few aid agencies, cared; they were just grateful the water was there. In the outside world hardly anybody paid much attention. There were a few exceptions – the paranoid actuaries for the giant insurance company Munich Re, for example, who are paid to worry, and a few analysts in hurricane centers across the Atlantic, who were wrestling with the complex causative cycles of violent weather – but more people should have been concerned that that, for they were about to get a brutal lesson in the interconnectedness of natural systems.”
Following an exploration of each stage in the lifecycle of Ivan, de Villiers delves into every aspect of wind itself: how storms have changed history; how the ancient Greeks and Romans tried to decipher what, exactly, air and wind are; how the earth’s rotation and heat from the sun give rise to the world’s prevailing winds; the evolution of meteorology; the threat of global warming; even the flight science of birds and airplanes.
Some of his detours can become arcane, even tedious, but there are enough gems of inspired insight scattered throughout to make the whole book a well worthwhile read. Take, for example, this intriguing tidbit from the chapter on pollution and climate change:
“Large dust arrivals from Africa have now been found over 30 percent of the continental United States; although no one has yet estimated its mass, it would be a small fraction of the amount that leaves the Sahara. About half the volume that reached the United States settles on Florida. On any given day, a third to a half of the dust drifting through Miami comes not from local beaches but from Africa.”
Or consider his brief mention of Otto Lilienthal, a German scientist whose aviation experiments in the late 1800s later inspired the Wright brothers:
“Over a span of five years he developed eighteen models of gliders, fifteen of them monoplanes and three biplanes âÂ?¦’To invent an airplane is nothing,’ he once famously said. ‘To build one is something. But to fly is everything.’ âÂ?¦ Alas, he was a victim of his own experiments, and he died after a crash of one of his hand gliders on August 10, 1896.”
“Windswept” ends, again, with a personal tale. Ivan, it turns out, while no longer a hurricane, ended up battering de Villiers’ own rugged home on the coast of Nova Scotia. While not nearly as destructive as its previous incarnation, this Ivan – de Villiers calls it “Ivan Redux” – brought gusts of up to 65 miles per hour, made the spruce trees sway dangerously and threatened to knock out the power. The near-outage prompts de Villiers to consider installing a wind-powered generator and to worry about the vulnerability of humanity itself:
“This lack of trust is expressed through a basket of concerns about increasingly erratic weather, the security of long-term fuel supplies, and the uncertainties that greenhouse gases represent for the global climate. These are in effect worries not just about our own place in the scheme of things but also for the scheme of things itself – that is, for the planet’s future; and both sets of concerns were neatly encapsulated for me by the monster, Ivan, which was not only a uniquely intense storm, but traveled more than eight thousand miles and caused enormous damage and loss of life, and then, before expiring, cast its baleful eye on me personally, and took a swipe at my house.”
