So I was a little flip about the wind yesterday. I changed my mind: Wind is a big deal. It tears into stop lights and snarls traffic, unscrews full-grown trees from the their earthy sockets, whips wires off the poles and takes down a whole neighborhood's power. Cars veer and small dogs take flight. Airplanes are grounded and branches fall into houses and tree limbs fly through windows. No one sleeps for the walloping weight of the wind against the western wall.
I've lived here for almost 30 years, and every January the wind threatens to blow us to Kansas. I learned that this wind is called a "chinook." When I was teaching in the mid-80s, one of my students at a local community college wrote about the annual "schnooks" in Colorado. I live in a place that is famous for schnooks, apparently. One of my first jobs here was with a bunch of meteorologists at NOAA, where they told stories about wind damage that would have been unbelievable, except that they were scientists and knew what they were talking about.
So this is to say sorry for being a schmuck about schnooks in yesterday's post. I won't do it again. Probably.
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