18 Miles

by Christopher Dewdney

  The Saffir-Simpson scale was officially released by the NHC in 1973. Because it was so difficult to be accurate about such variable and sometimes immeasurable quanta as storm surge and flooding, especially after Katrina, these effects were removed from the scale in 2009. The new scale, based on wind speed only, became operational on May 15, 2010.

  For a tropical storm to be promoted to hurricane status, it must have sustained winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour. At this intensity, category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, the storm causes minimal damage. A category 5 hurricane has sustained winds of more than 155 miles per hour and causes catastrophic damage. Category 5 is generally considered the most extreme intensity possible, but on August 14, 1992, Hurricane Andrew exceeded the wind speeds of a category 5, hitting the southern Florida coast with 175 mile-per-hour winds. Andrew is one of the few examples of a superhurricane, unofficially designated as a category 6. It killed 65 people and flattened more than 63,000 homes.

  Looking out over the rain-swept parking lot shining beneath the sodium security lights, I was, as they say, totally pumped, but also a little apprehensive. My building was solid, but how intense was the wind going to get? I went out front and stood on the balcony overlooking the beach. In the darkness, all I could see was the sideways glitter of rain in the security floodlights. Fortunately the wind direction was exactly parallel to the building and the beach. That eliminated the danger of storm surge for now, which was good because storm surge is the deadliest part of a hurricane, causing nine out of 10 hurricane-related fatalities.

  Hurricane winds push water ashore, and if a hurricane’s landfall happens to coincide with a high tide, the effect is the same as a tsunami. I have seen footage of a storm surge smashing into an already flooded parking lot and pushing cars and trucks ahead of it like so many pop bottles. A category 1 hurricane can create a storm surge of four to five feet above the normal tide line, while a category 5’s surge can reach 18 feet.

  One of the highest storm surges on record occurred in Bathurst Bay, Queensland, Australia, on March 5, 1899. A late-season tropical cyclone by the name of Mahina drove a 42-foot storm surge onto shore. If you were vacationing in Bathurst Bay that week, your ocean-view hotel room had better have been on the fifth floor or higher, because the bottom four stories would have been entirely flooded. To put it in perspective, the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand swamped the bottom two floors of the seaside resorts there.

  A power outage was pretty much inevitable, so while the water was still running, I filled containers from the kitchen tap. I completely forgot to fill the bathtub and sink, probably because I was rattled and tired. I went back to bed but hardly dozed off. The sound of the wind seemed to be increasing.

  At first light, I checked the light switches: the power was off. Then I went to the front balcony (thank goodness I was on the second floor) to look at the storm. The wall separating my balcony from my neighbor’s provided a natural wind break. The wind was blowing east to west — left to right for me — and as I watched, it flattened a brand-new picket fence that ran beside the oceanfront garden. Thirty-pound palm fronds that had been ripped from coconut trees were skidding along the beach like runaway boogie boards. The waves on the ocean beyond the beachfront garden were high but running parallel to the shore. No storm surge yet.

  There was nothing for it — I had to go out and experience the storm directly. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and clutching the railing of the staircase leading down from my unit. I stepped out into the wind. It was like having your head out the window of a car on the highway, only in this case, my whole body was being blown. I descended the stairs with some difficulty because I had to lean into the wind. Walking to the beach, I employed the same leftward lean. There, on the shore I took in the spectacle. High waves running parallel to the shore were having their spume sheared away by the gale.

  The wind caught at my face, and I could feel my skin rippling. The rain hurt. I thought at first it was just the velocity of rain, as if I was being hit by a water cannon, but then I realized it was filled with sand grains. It stung, viciously. So I did what anyone else would do, I leaned into the wind at an angle so steep that if the wind dropped, I would have fallen face first onto the wet sand. I’ve never experienced such constant, intense wind. There was something industrial about it, nothing like the variable gusts of a summer storm. It was more like standing in a wind tunnel.

  Joseph Conrad wrote about hurricane wind in his book Typhoon, “This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were — without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.”

  Good enough. I headed back in and toweled off.

  Katrina, as I experienced her that morning, was still a category 1 storm, but imagine what a category 5 would have felt like. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have been able to stand on the beach. Actually my metaphor of sticking my head out the window of a car could be extended but, in the case of a category 5 hurricane, instead of a highway think of a Formula One racetrack. Think of a house careening down an Indy 500 course at 155 miles per hour. The house’s asphalt shingles wouldn’t last through the first turn. Hurricanes can even peel off heavy, clay roof tiles. In fact, if you parked an Indy 500 car by the beach during a hurricane, it would sandblast the high-gloss enamel paint down to the metal. Hurricanes peel corrugated tin from roofs and then lift the whole roof off. They blow out windows, doors and completely flatten simple, wooden-frame buildings.

  My position, I found out later, was 40 miles north of Katrina’s eye as she headed for Florida. The phrase “headed for Florida” is a bit of a misnomer; she was already there. Most hurricane cloud shields are at least 300 miles in diameter, but it’s only the eye that the National Hurricane Center tracks.

  Katrina struck just south of Miami at half past six that evening, after which she veered south over the Everglades and by the next day, Friday, she was heading west into the Gulf of Mexico.

  The power came back on in my building early Friday morning, August 26. The sun was starting to shine, and the wind had died down to an intermittent breeze. I drove to Freeport to get some groceries. There was some local flooding — I had to drive through puddles the size of ponds — but aside from tree branches and coconut palm fronds everywhere, Freeport looked intact. I appreciated, for the first time in a purely practical way, the stolid, neoclassical architecture of the government buildings: limestone columns and thick, limestone block walls. In fact, the building I was staying in, which had seemed overbuilt to me with its thick concrete walls and heavy roof tiles, now made perfect sense. What wasn’t bolted, cemented or tied down would blow away.

  Katrina was a nocturnal hurricane. She intensified in the darkness over warm seas, and the Gulf of Mexico was very warm that summer. She ramped up her power again around five on Saturday morning; before noon that day, she was a category 3 hurricane and looked to be headed directly toward New Orleans. Things were getting very serious. The state governor had issued a hurricane watch the day before, and now the mayor of New Orleans issued a voluntary evacuation recommendation.

  Early that afternoon, a Lockheed Martin WC-130J aircraft stuffed with meteorological instruments took off from Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, piloted by the famous Hurricane Hunters, an elite Air Force Reserve unit of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Following their usual hurricane flight plan, they made two penetrations into the eye of Katrina, one at 10,000 feet and another mind-boggling pass at a mere 500 feet, just above airborne palm fronds and roof tiles.

  It was worse than anyone had thought. Katrina had grown into a monster. The Hurricane Hunters reported that its circulation covered the entire Gulf. Although Katrina was a category 3 hurricane when it hit New Orleans a day and half later, its storm surge was extraordinarily
large, a catastrophic 25 to 28 feet in height. This was why the levees in New Orleans didn’t have a chance.

  On Sunday, August 28, while Katrina was approaching New Orleans, I flew back to Toronto. The only evidence of Katrina’s passage through Miami, at least at the airport, were some puddles on the runways. The Monday morning news was already filled with scenes of chaos from New Orleans. The storm was a national disaster.

  In a strange twist, after Katrina left New Orleans, she had one more punch left in its bag. She entirely destroyed the Keesler Air Force Base on her way north. It almost seemed vindictive. The base has since been rebuilt, and the Hurricane Hunters fly out of Biloxi once again.

  Looking back, it seems to me that Katrina and I took turns stalking each other. First, she snuck up on me while I slept, then she abandoned me for Florida. I followed her a few days later, but she was already churning through the gulf. And on Wednesday the next week, she came all the way to Toronto.

  In the interim, I followed Katrina’s progress on the weather channel. She swept northeast on Tuesday, through Mississippi and then Tennessee where she was downgraded to a tropical depression. She still had a lot of momentum though, and the edge of her cloud shield slipped over Toronto that evening. The next day, the center of the storm absorbed a frontal boundary and became an extratropical storm, swirling through Ohio and across Lake Ontario into Toronto.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 31, I went into my backyard and stood in Katrina’s warm deluge once more, six days after I had felt the sting of her gritty wind-whipped rain on the beach in Grand Bahama. Her fury had quieted to occasional gusts, but she still held a lot of rain. I let myself get soaked. Was I imagining it or was there a faint ocean scent in the air?

  7

  Palace of the Winds

  “Who has seen the wind?

  Neither you nor I:

  But when the trees bow down their heads,

  The wind is passing by.”

  Christina Rossetti

  “Listen to no one’s advice except that of the wind in the trees.”

  Claude Debussy

  Wind is elusive, capricious, sensual and dangerous. From out of nowhere, a zephyr can brush your cheek as lightly as a feather or, with a sudden tug, a gust will turn your umbrella inside out. A scent can be carried on the wind to our nostrils, but wind itself is odorless, tasteless and colorless. Yet for all its transparency, it does have dimension. And sound. Wind sighs in the pine trees at night, and, as Rossetti witnessed, wind has shape — we see its muscular surges rippling fields of wheat and its intricacies in drifting smoke.

  Each of us encloses an intimate wind — the narrow rushing stream of air we inhale through our nose, which whistles down our throats into our lungs and then out again. The breath of life. That is why the ancients believed, as Anaximenes wrote in the sixth century BCE, that the world itself breathes and that the atmosphere was the spiritus mundi — the soul of the world. And the wind, which the ancient Greeks called pneuma, was heaven’s breath.

  The connection between wind and breath is everywhere in our idioms. Casual conversation is called shooting the breeze, but if you’re an empty-headed gabber, you’re a windbag. The answer may be blowing in the wind but only if you know which way the wind blows. And whatever you do, don’t throw caution to the wind because then you’ll be sucking wind or, worse still, find yourself pissing into the wind. Then when the wind is taken out of your sails and you try to drown your sorrows, you’ll finish the day three sheets to the wind. Perhaps later you might get wind of something, maybe a potential windfall, but when you run like the wind, you might just end up trying to catch your wind.

  But what is wind? In the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti took it upon himself to summarize what was then known. Alberti epitomized the Renaissance man. Not only was he an author, a poet, a linguist, a philosopher, an artist, an athlete (he could leap over a standing man and ride wild horses) and a renowned architect, he was also somewhat of a natural historian. In his treatise on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria, in a sort of disclaimer near the beginning, he lists all the competing contemporary theories about the origin and nature of wind.

  Whether these Conjectures be true, or whether the Wind be occasioned by a dry Fumosity of the Earth, or a hot Evaporation stirred by the pressure of the Cold; or that it be, as we may call it, the Breath of the Air; or nothing but the Air itself put into Agitation by the Motion of the World, or by the Course and Radiation of the Stars; or by the generating Spirit of all Things in its own Nature active, or something else not of a separate Existence, but consisting in the Air itself acting upon and inflamed by the Heat of the higher Air; or whatever other Opinion or Way of accounting for these Things be truer or more ancient, I shall pass over as not making to my purpose.

  A century later, in 1563, the English meteorologist William Fulke declared that that wind is “an Exhalation hot and dry, drawn up into the Air by the power of the Sun, and by reason of the weight thereof being driven down, is laterally or sidelong carried about the Earth.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I like it. The title of his publication is almost better: A Goodly Gallery with a Most Pleasant Prospect, into the Garden of Natural Contemplation, to Behole the Natural Causes of All Kind of Meteors.

  More than 1,500 years earlier, Vitruvius, who had inspired Alberti, and whom we’ll encounter again, wrote that wind is “a flowing wave of air, moving hither and thither indefinitely. It is produced when heat meets moisture, the rush of heat producing a mighty current of air.” I like his elusive definition, the “hither and thither indefinitely.” It captures well the whimsical nature of wind.

  The most accurate explanation of wind is the simplist: it is air on its way elsewhere. It is the result of atmospheric pressure differences, always flowing from high to low pressure along the path of least resistance. Wind is air on a mission, on its way to balance inequalities.

  The Anemoi:

  Greek Gods of the Winds

  According to Greek mythology, Aeolus was ruler of the winds, and he kept the four powerful gods of the cardinal winds (the Anemoi), as well as the Aellai and Aurai (the nymphs of the breezes), inside the hollow interior of his floating bronze island called Aeolia. In some accounts, Aeolus was a warden, incarcerating the winds on his island prison. Other accounts described the island as a stable for the winds. Whenever he released them, they thundered up through the peak of the island into the sky like the equestrian spume of some invisible volcano before they swooped down to scour the waves and land.

  The Spartans, who loved horses, attached some significance to this association between wind, horses and mountains. They used to sacrifice a horse to the Anemoi on Profitis Ilias, the tallest mountain in the Taygetus mountain range in southern Greece. To claim that a horse ran as “fast as the wind” must have already been a common saying.

  The north wind was one of the fastest. Of all the winds that Aeolus shepherded, it was Boreas, god of the north wind and winter, who was a favorite son of the Greeks. He was portrayed as a strong old man with flowing gray hair and a harsh temper. Boreas was also associated with autumn and was sometimes referred to as the “devouring one.” He could, if he wished, take on the form of a horse. Pliny mentioned that mares that stood with their hindquarters to the north wind could bear foals without a stallion.

  Because Boreas kidnapped an Athenian princess and fathered her children, the people of Athens considered him a relative by marriage and prayed to Boreas when the Persian army threatened Athens. He was a sly, lustful god. When Zeus abducted Europa, Boreas blew her tunic, lifting it up so that he could thrill at the sight of her lovely breasts. Yet his glimpse only served to inflame his jealousy that Zeus should carry off such a prize.

  Zephyros was god of the west wind and bringer of spring and early summer. Like his brother Boreas, Zephyros was identified with old age and winter; he once had a sharp temper like Boreas, but his love for Flora, the goddess o
f the spring, mellowed his disposition. In friezes and mosaics, he is depicted gliding through the air, his mantle filled with flowers.

  It is perhaps of the younger, more strident Zephyros that Shelley writes in his “Ode to the West Wind” (1819).

  O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

  Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

  Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

  Pestilence-stricken multitudes.

  In the Greek pantheon of wind dieties, only Notus, the south wind and bringer of rain and late summer storms, was young. His season was spring, and his dominion was sanguinous, for blood runs quickly in the spring. Any depictions of Notus portray him as a young man carrying an inverted water jar, spreading rain across the land. When he was airborne (like the rest of the wind gods, he often was), he flew wrapped in a cloud like a UFO in a Spielberg film. His realm was the tropics and North Africa, where hundreds of years later the greatest Roman city of all, Leptis Magna, rose from the desert in the dominion of Notus.

  Eurus, god of the east wind, had no assigned season, although he was sometimes associated with summer and was thought to bring rain. He too was portrayed as an old man, though with a dark complexion and fierce features who often brought foul weather. In many depictions, he is crowned with a radiant sun, acknowledging that the new day rises in the east. His gloomy disposition belied his attributes, which were infancy and summer. And yet the east wind was reputed to be unlucky, particularly for seafarers. In The Mirror of the Sea, Joseph Conrad writes, “The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.”

  The Greeks also deified the quarterly winds, of whom the god of the northeast wind, Kalkias, and the god of the northwest wind, Skiron, were yet again both intemperate old men. The god of the southwest wind, Lips, and the god of the southeast wind, Apeliotes, were young men.