When the Wind Blows - a podcast by Red Kite Prayer

As night falls early, the sun blotted by a solid bank of pregnant, gray cloud, the tall pines sway side-to-side in increasingly wide arcs, the shushing of their needles growing steadily in volume until the air is nothing but radio static. We bed down in the hallway, all the bedroom doors shut against the possibility of broken, flying glass.

Late summer, 1979. I am seven-years-old, Hurricane Frederic swirling up through the Gulf of Mexico. We have filled the bathtub with water, taped the windows, stowed the patio furniture. I don’t yet understand what wind can do.

And then around 10pm, a train whistle, except there is no train. The wind is screaming through the gaps beneath the doors, keening and whining. My seven-year-old self feels afraid. The world is pitch black and impossibly loud. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is happening. The power is out. The water stops running.

The wind can do anything.

My old commute ran down the Charles River. Joggers in summer. Water fowl in winter. And some days, the worst days, the wind pushing back against the current hard enough to create waves rolling the wrong direction, back towards land, the scullers pulling frantically at their oars, the boathouse never near enough.

Or that coldest day of the year, 7 degrees Fahrenheit with a 25mph sustained wind spiking to gale force. I rode as a dare to myself. The wind ought not blow so hard when the air is so cold and thin, and yet, the wind can do anything. It doesn’t care what I think.

Now, if the wind blows, I can put my head down, chin to stem, trying to find the aerodynamics my helmet promised me. I can back off one shift, two, even three, if there are even three left. Why are there only ever two?

I can swear, aloud or to myself. I can contemplate the meteorology. We imagine ourselves separate from the universe, hermetically sealed in our cozy atmosphere, but the spinning of this big, blue marble, its churn against the nothingness of space sends us all skittering across the Doppler radar. I can almost piece together an explanation in my mind with what has passed for my science education, but then I am hypoxic with the struggle against this invisible marauder. Higher order thinking, analysis, ceases to be possible.

Like you need two points to make a line, you need two riders to make an echelon, a single note accordion, a twin bed.

What is a knot, and how many of them are hitting me in the face? Is the wind channeling between two buildings or blowing flat across the farm fields? Will I come around soon, get it at my back? I imagine the boom of a sailboat swiveling from the mast, ducking my head, the sail luffing hard before pulling taught, and speed coming back into my legs. I imagine it, but it doesn’t happen.

The thing is, it is unfair, this wind. It shouldn’t be. But it is. It always is.

 

 

The Paceline Cycling Podcast

Further podcasts by Red Kite Prayer

Website of Red Kite Prayer