This post revisits a post from 2011 (and originally from maybe 2004) where the wind was the dominant feature of our winter days. This, I might add, was a complaint when we heard the wind constantly, but felt it not often, mostly protected from its abrasions in the deep valley formed by Goose Creek—the headwaters of the Roanoke River.
Last night the wind screamed overhead like a great circling bird, back and forth from ridge to ridge. When it took a notion, it swooped down to clutch at our porch roof and ruffle the metal, making a strange rumbling studio-thunder sound effect.
It lifts again to circle a thousand feet above us, coursing the high places round and round, like a great locomotive caught in a switching yard, right over Goose Creek.
Winter winds and summer winds are distant relatives. Summer winds throw angry tantrums like this just briefly, and only when performing the accompaniment to a summer thunder storm.
A million green living leaves modulate the pitch and timbre of the wind, so that even in the summer gale there is a softness, a lifting and cleansing quality that is altogether missing from harsh wind in winter.
Summer wind appears at the height of the storm, strutting and fretting about briefly; and then it exits stage left and its pitch falls off, Doppler-like, and only a cooling breeze is left behind. I have no complaints to register against summer winds.
But winter wind arrives here irritable and there is no cheering it up. Dense and gray, heavier than air, it sinks into our valley like a glacier of broken glass, pushing down against hard and frozen earth, and it will not relent.
If you listen, you may think you hear a tone to the roar of January wind, a discrete pitch of a note that you could find on a piano keyboard. But this isn’t so.
In the same way all rainbow colors blend to make white light, January wind is the sound of all tones that nature can create, at once together as the Old Man overhead blows through a mouthpiece formed of ridge and ravine, across reeds of oak and poplar trunks.
Winter wind is the white noise of January that won’t go away.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE