A Dry Wind
During high school, I lived in Rome, Italy. When most people think of Italy they think of great food, the treasures of Florence and the Medici, the days of Marcus Aurelius and his views of Virtūs et Honos (Strength and Honor), the betrayals of Julius Caesar as made famous by William Shakespeare, the petrified and frozen-in-time inhabitants of Pompeii and perhaps the Nastro Azurro ads of some George Clooney look-alike getting off a Chris Craft onto a dock on Lake Como. One of the things most people who haven’t lived in Rome rarely think about in the wind. If you’re from Chicago, you think of the wind, but not so much Rome.
But I remember the winds in Rome. Mostly I remember the Scirocco of late summer. Scirocco is an Arabic word and it specifically relates to the wind that rises with the great heat of the Sahara Desert and takes its toll for two or three days at a time on Southern Europe. It carries with is the red sand of North Africa which gets deposited in Southern Italy as “blood rain” when it combines with the moisture of the Mediterranean Sea. It also silently pits the cars of Rome and Naples with specs of rust spots where the grit of the desert infiltrates the polished metal of the Fiats and Alfa Romeos.
In truth, the Scirocco is only one of many annual winds that are felt in Rome, as the most central city in the Mediterranean. There are eight winds that match off the eight points of the compass and remind us that some places in the world are at a vortex and get it from all sides. The Mistral blowing in from Southern France is the alter-ego of the Scirocco and it is what gives Provence its Provençal loveliness and clean, clear air. There are the squalls of the Libeccio traveling in over Corsica from Libya, and the chill of the Tramontane, which comes from the barbarous north in the Alps and brings with it many strange feelings. Meanwhile the westerly Ponente brings the warm dry winds from the Catalan of Spain and the Levante comes from the East over Greece and just lightly touches Rome as it rushes towards the Venturi opening of Gibraltar where it cleanses the Mediterranean of its unwanted detritus. But nothing creates the feelings of unease caused by the Scirocco during the still of August and the festivals of Ferragosto. It was Marcus Aurelius who started that august tradition and then Mussolini who cemented it into the Italian workers’ God-given right to take time off when the mighty Scirocco blows in mid-August.
The mystical Gypsies are called the Roma people and they are the nomadic people that gather in the corners of the world where the wind blows them from their origins in the Punjab and gathers on them the Aryan dust of that area just north of the Black Sea, through which many populations have migrated and which we now call the Ukraine. These Indo-European people are more often denigrated in Europe as thieves and scoundrels, where they are really no worse than any nomads who are distrusted and misunderstood by more indigenous people, whose lands they pass through. In many legends that have inspired our upbringing, the wind blows in both uncertainty and unease, but also a degree of wisdom that life as we know it is almost always fleeting. We see it as Mary Poppins blows in on East Wind and is greatly influenced by the cold North Wind. Her work with the needy Banks family is done when the wind changes. We recently rewatched Chocolat with Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp and Alfred Molina, which tells the story of the Gypsies that blow in with the North Wind and how the feeling of unease during the Lenten season brings about change and ultimate redemption for a little insular village in France. The messages of the effect of the wind on all of our lives is hard to miss.
I have become a student of the wind here on my hilltop. I have a weathervane on the highest point of my property on the front rock outcropping, to remind me of which way is true north. I also have two wind sculptures in the garden and seven more on the back hillside. I went so far as driving to Sedona, beyond the Mojave Desert from which our local desert winds blow, to buy the largest of them. They are vertical and horizontal in orientation and fixed and flexible in their ability to capture the wind. Being situated between the Pacific Ocean ten miles to the West and the deserts (Mojave, Sonoran, Great Basin and Anza-Borego) to the East, my hilltop is at its own vortex. When you look at a weather map that shows the wind flows in this area you see precisely what is happening and what drives the craziness of the winds in this vortex. It is basically a constant battle between the rush of air from the Pacific Ocean onto the warmer or colder landmass of San Diego, and the rush eastward of the predominantly hot and dry air of the inland deserts. They meet on one hilltop and ridge line in between and are driven northward most of the time. Because I can see both the San Gabriel and San Jacinto mountains from my window, I know I am looking at the barriers that keep me from being buffeted by even more changeable winds than I already feel on this hilltop. I have inadvertently set my fixed wind sculptures such that they warn me of when and where the wind is coming. They were vibrating from spinning fast the last few days.
Lately, the wind has been strongly from the East and it is the dry wind of the desert. The weather reports now say that the downslope winds of the Santa Ana are once again descending on us here in San Diego this week. I can feel it and I can see it. The seeing is spectacular because it brings clarity to the horizon that is amazing. I can define Catalina, 65 miles off into the distant Pacific Ocean. I can practically see climbers and skiers on Mount San Jacinto’s tight snowpack. As for the feeling, my body has desiccated to the point of my skin itching around my torso, my legs in need of urgent care lotion and my hands rubbing together like two dry and brittle leaves, as though in anticipation of me working with water-drawing stucco for my Hobbit House in process.
As I write about the dry wind that woke me up way too early on a Sunday morning, with an itch here and a scratch there, I am reminded of all the things that the wind brings and takes from us. It is the wind that blows the Gypsies and the Fairies and probably the Hobbits to their next adventures. Both my mother and my father come from a region of the world north and east of the Alps. It is not quite the vortex of Crimea, but it is close by. It is probably a place that weary wanderers who passed from Asia Minor toward Europe, stopped and rested and then decided the place was good enough to make a life. Human migration is part of our heritage and may define the human condition as much as anything. And it is the wind, today warm and dry, rushing at me on the downslope from the San Jacinto, that will stir my soul and make me do whatever it tells me to do. Such is the state of my soul on this sunny February morning.