Last week, I searched through John Cole's In Maine for an essay on the start of November to post. Looking through his book always takes a little longer than planned, because I rediscover what a beautiful writer John was and can't help but read a few essays.
John loved the natural wonders of Maine. Among his topics were subjects as simple, or perhaps as complicated, as the wind. In one essay, he wrote: "Of all the winds that blow, I like the northwest best. It is rare as a summer wind along this upper corner of the Atlantic Coast, but in late August the first nor’westers return, bringing clarity, excitement and an energy that has been missing from the prevailing southerly breezes that so damply dominate the New England Junes and Julys."
And followed later with: "It is out of this brilliant stillness that the northwest wind is born. The leaves rustle first, the meadow grass bends, the willow boughs swing, there is a sigh from the elm, and then, announced by the first cottony puff of a fair-weather cloud in the west, like smoke from a cannon, the northwest wind arrives in a blustery rush, pushing up whitecaps on the bay, sweeping an ever increasing fleet of plump clouds through the sky, turning damp to dry, hot to cool, apathy to alacrity, depression to joy … making life everywhere better than it was before and reminding me every time of why it is important to know which way the wind blows."
The importance of knowing the wind is also the subject of this full Cole essay, which gave title to one of the first books we republished:
“I am no longer sailing the same waters I did as a fisherman more than
a decade ago, but much of the same exuberance I knew off Montauk is still
part of my life. It is a welcoming of the days, an armswide greeting,
an embrace of all the hours. And the hours that are most cherished are
those that fly in on the wings of the northeast wind.
In Maine, the wind still moves as it has for eons. There are few cities to
baffle it with their fingers of concrete and glass, few factories to soil it with
smoke and sulphur, few engines to override it with noise or charge it with
monoxide. Here I can live with the free wind as I lived with it off Montauk where
all the winds clean themselves in the sea.
In Maine, I have watched the wind being born, birthing in the western sky and
then feathering the bay's silken surface with the first tentative touch of its
young pinions. I have seen the nor'westers make a sea of our meadow, rolling the
high grass in waves that break on the crest of our hill. And I have felt the same
wind fill a sail with a hard slap that sets my boat a running.
"It does the same to me. It dashes its fresh chill in my face, clears my head and
sets my thoughts a running. Of the nor'west thoughts, the one that echoes loudest
each September is the one about knowing ... knowing which way the wind blows.
What has happened is that too many men decided they no longer needed to know.
The decision came in a rush that had been building for tens of centuries when all
men lived always with the wind. They knew the same wind that brought the fat
ducks in the fall also brought its cutting edge in winter. They watched the wind
dry their saved soil to dust and blow it to the sea; they witnessed the wind-made
waves that sent their sailing ships ashore, crushing the souls within like so
much chaff. For them the wind was more cruel than kind; certainly cruelty often
came mixed with kindness."
Then, just a moment ago on the century clock, men learned how to build temples
the wind could not torment, ships the wind could not sink, fields that could not
be flayed. Because the wind was subjugated, it was also forgotten; or, if not
forgotten, shelved, set aside, ignored to the point where most men arose in their
temples and set forth on their days without knowing which way the wind blew,
without caring, without looking, without seeing.
"The ignorance of the wind might have been expected (after centuries of being
awed by it), but it is not natural. Men cannot live without knowing ... knowing
which way the wind blows, which way the rain falls, how the sea surges, the land
lives and the forests die.
Yet there are multiple millions of men who don't know; men who live in cities in
windowless walls who walk Windy Corner and notice nothing more than city grit
much more of its now than when I walked there as a child. How to tell them which
way the wind is blowing; how to get them to know the nor'west experience; how to
dash its fresh chill in their face, to set them thinking, to set their boats
running how to do that is one of the puzzles I ponder most when the northwest
wind fills my Maine days.
Part of the answer, I decide, must be here in Maine. The other afternoon I
counted seven sparrow hawks flying over the field, or perched beside it. The tiny
falcons had been brought here on the wings of the northwest wind. It is the
parent bird of the falcons, and they fly with it for all their fall migration to
the south. They will stay in the field now until the northwest wind returns; then
they will leave and a new band of hawks will be blown in. Along with them will
come the plover, the geese, the teal, the curlew and the coot. They, and their
wind, will enrich each of my autumn days until the wind locks away the bays
behind a wall of ice.
Today is an autumn day, and as I watch the falcons fly under the wings of the
northwest wind, I wish the same sight could be seen by the millions who have
forgotten why the wind blows, or how, or where.
After seeing Maine in September, they may forget no more.”