Tuesday, June 17, 2014

THE WIND

The f***ing wind is blowing.  

Again.  

Still.

It's been blowing like this for days.

Gusting up to 30 miles per hour.

The trees are whipped around constantly.

Prescott Valley is known for its spring winds.  But this, for crying out loud, is the middle of June!  When is it going to stop?

Awhile ago, Judy said the front porch is a mess of leaves.  She wants to go out and sweep it off.  But the damnable wind keeps blowing and more and more leaves keep falling.

We were out this morning and heard a woman in an office say "all the trash from my neighbor's yard is now over in mine."

When the wind blows like this I am often reminded of a line from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of short stories from decades ago by Joan Didion.  She was writing in one of the stories about the Santa Ana winds of Southern California.  She wrote something like, when the Santa Anas are blowing, the housewife cleaning up the kitchen after dinner idly runs her thumb along the edge of a butcher knife while absently studying her husband's jugular vein.

Those, my friends, are some evil winds.

Here in Arizona, just like in California, year after year of drought have the forests and the brushlands bone dry and only one spark can set off a conflagration.

Another fire was burning yesterday in once-beautiful Oak Creek Canyon, much of which was charred only a couple of weeks ago by a fire that lasted for days.

Several other fires have been reported around the state.  News reports say the entire state is in high fire danger.

And the f***ing wind is blowing.

8 comments:

  1. I share your frustration and can't remember spring winds lasting this long, at least three months. I spent more time outside when I lived in Alaska. It reminds me of the silent movie "Wind" where Lillian Gish moves to Oklahoma and is driven nuts by the wind.

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  2. Urgh - I think I'd be going crazy too - & worried!

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  3. A relentless wind, especially a warm wind, can be unsettling. The fire danger in this drought is severe. We feel lucky on those many nights when a marine bank is drawn over the coast and into the valley and canyons. Good luck there in PV

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  4. Battrn down the hatches, it'll pass.

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  5. To add to Yates' poem, "What rough beast is this, it's hour come round at last..."
    You have unrelenting wind, I'm having the winter that won't quit. My sympathies....

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  6. I talked to my sister yesterday and she had much the same sentiments. She said it was really blowing, very hard. When I told her it was breezy down here too she said, this isn't breeze, this is forceful winds, the kind that takes limbs down and fans fires.

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  7. I have always thought that was a big problem with Prescott Valley. To me, the wind never seems to stop

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  8. I remember those Santa Ana winds when I lived in Southern California. They do make you feel irritated, but I don't think I was ever prompted to murder anyone.

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