Posts From the Road - Wind and Bone

Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone
The stedfast and enduring bone.
-A.E. Houseman The Immortal Part
 

Weather in the Midwest arrives not like a thief in the night, but often like a flash mob. One moment it is peaceful motion and the next, dark forms crashing, the horizon filled with heat and light and threat, that motion striking at you, carrying with it barely contained violence, like scent.

I've lived in the Midwest for over 25 years. I'm regularly asked when I'm going to transfer back West to be where I grew up and be near family. I'm not, though I spend all of my leave time there helping out.  It's not that I don't dearly love  the few of them that remain, but because my heart is here, sending tendrils down into our rich soil like thirsty roots.

I saw my first tornado here, stopping my car, letting it idle off the fuel of the Carboniferous period, the air almost seeming to stop breathing, my own breath surely, if only momentarily, stopped. Do I run towards it? Do I run away? It's a ways off, a single dreadlock from the sky, twisting turning, daring me to touch it. From the opposite direction come the headlights of oncoming cars, flashing their lights at me "run away! run away!"


I have no protection but my courage and a beat up pickup, so I look for shelter if I need it. Underpasses are not good despite their reputation, there are no buildings nearby, time to turn the vehicle and follow the trail of flickering lights leading me to the emergency exit, the next county, the opposite direction of the storm track.

Tornadoes tend to have their own season but the thunderstorms that spawn them don't and with them, often come damaging winds and rain. I'm used to the steady wash of rain that is Seattle, but out here, the precipitation comes in like kettle drums, hard, pounding rains that come with a of boom of thunder and a blanket of sky cracking with electricity that is more than static.

With it comes the rain, soaking the needy earth.

They say that water washes away sin, but if sin is just words, then so is salvation.


The rain washes clean, but it as well leaves its mark. Gouges from rivulets in the calloused summer soil, as if scraped by hard nails. Bullet strikes in the hard earth. Marks that will not fade until further rain falls, warm spring rain that nourishes and renews.

Just as my first Spring was a revelation, my first Winter was an eye opener, despite from being from a Montana family. Dense fogs of ice crystals that coated everything, thundersnow, and winds that would blow off the prairie from the West, rampaging clippers that came down from Alberta, bearing with them not a friendly greeting but rather, a sudden, sharp slap in the face.


The summation of the skies is a visible affidavit of all that's powerful and mighty in the atmosphere, in our selves. It's a cold blowing truth that there's something within all of us that can be gathered up, strengthened. Something commanding that can change the form of a life. The weather brings components of force, some deep innate working in our selves. Lightning cleaving the sky as a machete, the smell of cordite in the air lingering like gunpowder. Thunder echoing as a a brace of artillery booming under a gunmetal sky, the power of the sky a transcendent weapon that can form or scar, however we view it, the landscape of our world.

Sometimes one has to work outside in it, bundled up in farm wear or Arctic military wear. You do what you need to, wind lamenting, whispers of darkness, the earth, your own voice, the sound in your ear of another voice, evocative of evenings of past warmth, keeping you moving, for to stop moving out here is to freeze to death.


I delivered my first calf here, the calf not budging from his mothers womb, the mother not helping in any fashion, for reasons known only to her. There's no easy way to do this but to go in, and help position the calf, hoping I don't get a broken arm from contractions for my efforts. There, the head, my fingers finding the mouth, the feel of the unborn tongue, there tasting, life and breath and air in my fingers. There is nothing in the world more lonely than being there for the birth of a solitary creature or the death of one.A little reposition, a good push from mama , the spreading of bone and he is out, protesting heartily as outside thunder flashed, illuminating sweat and blood and for this night at least, new life.

It is a wonder to me how that bone spreads, yet when I see those telltale marks upon the bones, in human remains, those marks on the dorsal side on the pubic symphysis near the margins of the articular surfaces and in the preauricular grooves or sulci of the ilia, they aren't to my eyes, notches of childbirth, they are the scars of sacrifice to save just one solitary life.

I stayed in that place, in the shadow of that barn, until the house was empty and the land grew blood, looking in the mirror one day, motionless, eyes downcast, looking as if I was waiting for that blow I'd already received.

It was time to move on, but not away.

I went back to school and finished that Ph.D., changed careers, got my first pistol, trained in its use, having only previously shot the occasional shotgun or rifle while hunting.  It rested on my hip as I drove miles through county after county, past fields of hay, huddled like Iroquois lodges, totems of silos standing solitary and watching. It was there in the sun and when nature and fate poured forth its fury, spilling liquid, scotching earth.


As I drive I watch the sky for massing clouds, the vertebrates of highway, passing underneath, the soft thump of tires as it passes over those small ridges of calcified earth and asphalt bone. It's a comfort to me, like this landscape, hard and practical yet capable of great strength and the flexibility to withstand what the heavens can throw at it. So delicate the bones of man and earth, and how strong.

I stand in a field, placing small flags to mark what my eye has captured, the wind picking up, swirling around the dust of spent lusts and ancient lies, ghosts of sad reflection, a hundred thoughts never formed and a thousand words never uttered. Wind sweeping my head of any emotion other than the task at hand, until the very roar of it  is a warning to look up. When I do, when I truly look at the sky, I know in a moment when I can safely cast my eyes back down, or run for shelter.  It's like listening in an ancient church to a priest chanting in a tongue which I do not even need to not comprehend.

I put my tools back into the soil, leaving my own parturition scar, trying to save a life by it's closure, even if it's mine. I keep one eye on the horizon, even as I return to work.  Whatever you do, don't blink.

You watch, your prepare, and sometimes, like other things in life, it sneaks up on you, one moment calm and upright the next, flashes of light against the sky, wheels running hard and fast either toward or away, previously dying leaves blown into fence rows, coming back to life with movement. The sky comes hungering after the land like a hungry wolf, something struggling for life between them, pulled and tossed with need, something flaring up as old as time, as necessary as water.

You never know when the wind will come up, how it will touch you. You can arrive in this land as cold and hard and flat as the armor the land is laid with and eventually the wind will arise, a murmuring voice that calls you in the night, warm rain released like coins from above, falling like a gift, seeping in under your surface, leaving only a small telltale drops on your skin as the sky clears. You look at the table, there laying side by side, a small white envelope with your name on it and some change, pennies from heaven indeed.

From outside comes the crack of thunder, the rain tattooing itself onto the roof as a truck door slams.  From inside, a bark of a dog, cracking on the wind like the rain itself.

 - Brigid