{"id":126110,"date":"2018-06-04T12:48:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T16:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126110"},"modified":"2018-06-05T14:20:18","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T18:20:18","slug":"a-taxonomy-of-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/04\/a-taxonomy-of-wind\/","title":{"rendered":"A Taxonomy of Wind"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, The Gust of Wind<\/em>, 1871.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything all right in here?\u201d one said, stepping into the room.<\/p>\n

I held out my palm to block the light.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolice,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was an alarm going off.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew there wasn\u2019t an alarm going off because it had been deactivated months earlier. I thought, This is not the police. This is a home invasion. When I turned on the bedside lamp and saw their uniforms, I thought, Those are fake uniforms.<\/p>\n

He told me to get out of bed. I stood between them in my boxers and T-shirt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are there no clothes in here?\u201d the other man said, pointing to the open drawers across the room. \u201cWhat, you just move in?\u201d They holstered their guns.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d I said. I\u2019d just returned home to Massachusetts after half a year away.<\/p>\n

Rain crackled on the roof and lashed the windows. The day had been warm because of a southerly storm shoving up against the underarm of Cape Cod. Out the window I saw a third man standing on the patio, perhaps guarding the exits.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome with us,\u201d one of the men said.<\/p>\n

The house is down a long driveway on a fishhook peninsula. On one side is the ocean; on the other is a river that shares my middle name. The house is a loft my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother. Hardwood floors. High ceilings. Wooden chandeliers hanging from wooden beams and permanently covered in a frost of dust. There\u2019s a cluttered centuries-worth of old books, shells, and antique souvenirs and no insulation.<\/p>\n

When I walked into the main room, I saw that the overhead lights and lamps were on. The men had been there for some time. I\u2019ve lived in the house since before I walked, and could lead a tour blindfolded. It\u2019s not easy to find the bedroom. You go into the house, take a U-turn to a back hallway, pivot to another hall, and go through a door. You\u2019d have to spend some time looking around for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I sat on the couch while they stood over me. They asked in so many ways for me to prove that I lived there. The clock on the stove blinked three\u00a0A.M<\/small>.\u00a0I had an Iowa driver\u2019s license, a Dutch visa, a passport with an old address, and a student ID from a college in New York. The men shook their heads. I thought of pointing out the window to the river flowing under the darkness. My namesake. Very obvious things can be hard to prove.<\/p>\n

One of the officers asked my birthday and social security number, relayed that into a radio strapped to his shoulder. \u201cYou\u2019re good,\u201d he said, quickly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two houses at this address,\u201d the other said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy aunt\u2019s house,\u201d I said, pointing across the driveway.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came down the driveway, and the door to this one was open,\u201d he said, explaining the mistake to himself. \u201cRain coming in. If a door is open and there\u2019s an alarm going off at the address, we enter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe southerly,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wind. It pushes open the door when the wind is from the south. The latch is broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Satisfied that I wasn\u2019t a squatter, they went off to check my aunt\u2019s house, where the alarm was still sounding. I walked to the doorway, put my hand out to feel the summery rain come down two weeks before Christmas. Thin waterfalls hissed off the roof. The maple trees bucked. It felt like the first night of spring. I wouldn\u2019t have been surprised to hear peepers.<\/p>\n

After they left, I sat in the kitchen with all the lights off, listening to the storm put its shoulder into the house. The breathy whistle of the wind\u2019s violence only increased before dawn. I went down to the basement, found a screwdriver, and took apart the front door\u2019s latch. But even with all the metal pieces spread on the ground, I couldn\u2019t figure out what was wrong with it. Something with the bolt. I put the pieces back together and leaned a chair against the door to keep it shut.<\/p>\n

I made coffee, toweled the wet floor by the door, and watched the sky go from dead blue to dead gray.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Alone and walking the peninsula in the following days, I thought of the southerly wind, of the chances that the gale opening a door coincided with my aunt\u2019s false alarm. By then the wind had clocked to a westerly, churning the sea and scattering branches over the lawn. Then came an icy northerly that laid the ocean down flat and waveless.<\/p>\n

On one of my walks, I looked up to the feathery cirrus clouds. I grew up calling them horsetails, and they predicted bad weather. I know the names of clouds, a lexicon I\u2019ve carried around since middle school: nimbus, cumulonimbus, cirrus, cumulus, thunderheads, wave clouds, roll clouds\u2014all freighted along in an unnamed broth of moving air.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why aren\u2019t there names for the wind? I thought. For these parentheses of the weather, binding up clouds and rain and snow and sun. Only in wind\u2019s velocity do we really notice it, give it a name. Bob. Harvey. Force 5. Sandy. Katrina. Titled in violence, or as the famous overseas giants: mistral, bise, trade winds. It\u2019s not surprising the wind often has a bad reputation\u2014even Ahab, the psychopath hunting earth\u2019s largest predator, finds it an imposing competitor: \u201c\u2009\u2019Tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! Who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet most of the time, the wind is a gentler and more ubiquitous thing. It\u2019s just a tree rustler. Hem player. As Marilynne Robinson writes in Lila<\/em>, \u201cThe wind always somewhere, trifling with the leaves, troubling the firelight.\u201d Something to put your face to on a hot day. The quotidian winds go unnamed in the shadow of the bigger ones\u2014as if thunderhead were the only cloud I knew.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a notebook, I jotted down the winds I had known, aside from the obvious ones, like the blustery nor\u2019easter, the locally famous Smokey Sou\u2019wester. There was the cold early-autumn northerly that reminds me still of the first days of school. There was that warm southerly in March, a harbinger of spring that puts you in a good mood. That three-day westerly coming in every season. That directionless midsummer wind, playful and mercurial, as if too excited with the day to decide where and how to blow. The wind that comes at sunrise and is gone in an hour. I imagined whole branches of winds, starting in cardinal directions and fanning into characteristics, just like order, family, genus, species. A taxonomy of winds.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a specific satisfaction in making lists. Frictionless writing that settles the mind. I named the back-to-school northerly Borealis Autumnus Frigus Serenum<\/em>. The warm harbinger of spring, Vernalis Amare<\/em> (\u201cfirst love\u201d). The westerly that never quit, Vesper Robustus Strenuissimum. <\/em>The directionless early summer wind, Profugo <\/em>(\u201chomeless\u201d). The sunrise wind, Prima Lux. <\/em>After days of walking along the ocean and thinking and naming, I had thirty-four types of wind branching out from the compass points, splitting in seasons, wet versus dry, cold versus warm, rare or common, under sunny skies or typically cloudy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The south wind that pushed open the door that night comes from the sea. Where I\u2019m from, it\u2019s called an offshore wind. It\u2019s a wind that generations of sailors\u2014those New Bedford and Nantucket whalers, merchants, fishermen\u2014have loved. The one that blew them home in the summer. On a downwind southerly, you move with and in the wind, and so all goes still\u2014allowed the same fragile expansiveness of a cloud freighted by wind that would flatten an oak. I fell asleep at the helm while sailing home on a southerly summers ago. I\u2019d draped my arm on the tiller. Let the boom swing out. Closed my eyes. Listened to the water\u2019s cluck on the hull. Woke up a quarter mile closer to land. Southerlies, and the storms they bore when it wasn\u2019t summer, roam through New England\u2019s literature. Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cTo the Thawing Wind\u220f starts with a trumpet blast: \u201cCome with rain, O loud Southwester!\u201d In the final lines of that poem, he describes the same type of storm wind I heard when sitting half naked with the police:<\/p>\n

Bathe my window, make it flow,
\nMelt it as the ice will go;
\nMelt the glass and leave the sticks
\nLike a hermit\u2019s crucifix;
\nBurst into my narrow stall;
\nSwing the picture on the wall;
\nRun the rattling pages o\u2019er;
\nScatter poems on the floor;
\nTurn the poet out of door.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The earlier New England bard Henry David Thoreau seems always to be jotting down the wind\u2019s character or musical instruments of the day. It \u201croars amid the pines like surf\u201d; \u201cthere is a certain resounding woodiness in the tone\u201d; \u201cthe faint sounds of birds\u2014dreaming aloud\u2014in the night\u2014the fresh cool air & sound of the wind rushing over the rocks.\u201d It\u2019s hard to find a page in his Cape Cod <\/em>that doesn\u2019t articulate the wind in degrees of iciness or strength or ocean raking or wave heaping. And often with ranging anthropomorphisms: \u201cThe wind seemed to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already agitated ocean.\u201d But of all the winds, he pays extra close attention to the southerly, as in these famous lines from Walden<\/em>: \u201cI am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The southerly usually brings warmth and freshness. A change. As Thoreau writes in \u201cA Winter Walk,\u201d \u201cThe south wind melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its withered grass and leaves, and we are invigorated by the perfume which exhales from it, as by the scent of strong meats.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always a Farmer\u2019s Almanac<\/em> lying around my house. If I wanted to investigate local winds, that\u2019s where I\u2019d find the best descriptions. Looking through the pages, I experienced that creepy echo you sometimes get in research\u2014the moment when you read a fact that you\u2019ve experienced firsthand and so experience it twice. It was in this old New Englander\u2019s saying: \u201cA southerly wind with showers of rain will bring the wind from the west again.\u201d The three-day Westerly had, in fact, swung in the day after the police left. Of course, these winds had already been tracked. There was likely already a local wind taxonomy, rolled up and stowed in the corner of an attic.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

By now I know myself enough to understand that I rarely deal with stress head-on. For instance, instead of first calling the police station to ask if two officers standing in your bedroom with guns was normal or legal, I spent days not doing much of anything, just looking at the trees stirring in the wind, the tussling dune grass, the gulls unfolding their wings and levitating over the beach.<\/p>\n

I understand now that in the wind taxonomy, I wanted to know who had opened the door and let the armed men into my house. I was looking for someone to blame. The police, I later learned, can enter any house with an open door. I was searching for a criminal responsible for the week of nights following in which I\u2019d gasp awake at almost exactly three A.M.<\/small> and look at the door, expecting silhouettes of men watching me sleep. I needed a name.<\/p>\n

I found him in the Auster Calidum Borealis<\/em> branch\u2014warm winter southerlies. Amare Falsus<\/em>, I called him. \u201cFalse love.\u201d That warm December wind, cousin of the January thaw. The one that stays for some blissful vernal days and then vanishes before an icy northerly swings around to shake the windowpanes. Coming and going. Leaving you unsure it was ever there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ben Shattuck is a writer and painter from coastal Massachusetts. He is the director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers\u2019 Residency, the curator of the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, and\u00a0a recipient of the 2017 PEN<\/small> America Best Debut Short Story Award. His writing can be found in the <\/em>Harvard Review,<\/em> The Common,<\/em> Salon,<\/em> Lit Hub, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me. \u201cEverything all right in here?\u201d one said, stepping into the room. I held out my palm to block the light. \u201cPolice,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":572,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[8641,8622,5014,3110,34302,790],"class_list":["post-126110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-henry-david-thoreau","tag-marilynne-robinson","tag-new-england","tag-robert-frost","tag-to-the-thawing-wind","tag-wind"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Taxonomy of Wind<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Why aren\u2019t there names for the wind? 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