The other day I was driving between Las Cruces and Silver City, NM, when I saw a prominent and noticeable sign warning of "Blowing Dust--Zero Visibility Possible." So what? It's New Mexico, guys.
What is so bad about wind, anyway? Where would our modern world be without sailing ships and the Age of Exploration? Maybe I'm just venting here because my RV has louvered windows that admit just a puff of wind when a gale is abeam. Wind cools you off by five degrees or more. Flying insects can't touch you. And yet the world dislikes it.
Years ago I learned the trick of wearing a hat with a cinch-strap. For some reason it makes wind far less bothersome.
Silver City had the right idea. They were having a kite festival. The first thing that I noticed was that most of the participants were adults rather than kids. I had a good time and then wandered off to let some more participants show up.
The bushes and trees on this hillside were decorated with unsightly, windblown litter. Notice that even an aluminum can is impaled on the cholla. Anyone who hikes much in the Southwest has a special relationship with this evil plant. Seeing litter on it makes me think of infantrymen caught up in the barbed wire during the Great War.
There was a second reason for this lurid image: at my aunt's house I had revisited a photograph of my grandfather, resting on an artillery caisson during that war. Dozens of people, like myself, owe their existence to the fact that he blew between the cholla during that tragic war.
I went back to the kite festival. I was playing with the camera when there was an explosive whoosh sound: a carpet-sized kite had crashed into the top of a chain link fence, just a few feet from me. It was destroyed. If these kites were any bigger the FAA would get involved with them.
What do you call the people who fly them? Pilots? Kite handlers?
Low-carbon-footprint, aeronautic, steering-persons? It was ballet and rodeo at the same time. What panache and style!
Don't think he is taking himself too seriously. Look at what happened to the last guy who lost his focus.
Perhaps this prejudice against wind is just the old "Cathedral of Nature" syndrome in disguise. People want to sentimentalize nature as having a static, quiescent perfection, rather like the perfect postcard. They don't want to see nature as process, change and conflict.
