The town where I grew up has a reputation for being one of the windiest places in Montana. It was common knowledge that if the wind gauge on the local public access television channel was reading 0 mph, it meant that the wind gauge was broken. The best anemometers available at the time would record wind gusts up to about 100 mph, but speeds above that often heated up the fans or bearings causing failure. My father had a hand held device that didn’t use a fan, but rather the suction caused by the wind blowing across a tube. The device was a bit less accurate, but it had no apparent failure point and we once saw gusts that were in the 120 mph range.

When I moved to Chicago, I would get occasional comments from friends about living in the windy city, but frankly, I didn’t experience Chicago as being any more windy than other places I had lived. But when we moved to Boise, Idaho, I did notice the wind, or rather the lack of wind. I discovered that it was possible to miss the wind. We lived in Boise for ten years and during that time there were many days when the air was so quiet that it became stale and I wished for a breeze of any kind. When there was an occasional gust of wind during a thunderstorm or other weather event, the trees would lose branches at the slightest puff. They simply weren’t used to any wind at all.

Here on the coast we do get some wind. I’ve been a bit surprised at some of the storms. The wind has been howling all night long. According to the weather reports there are sustained winds of 30 to 40 mph with gusts to 55. A new part of the weather reports for us are the gale warnings and small craft advisories. Having lived almost all of my life a thousand miles or more from the ocean, I don’t naturally think about the effects of the wind on waves and the operation of small boats. There are plenty of boats that don’t go 30 to 40 mph. Operating them safely means learning when to seek shelter in safe harbor. I can pretty much make decisions about when to paddle by kayak based on direct observation. If the winds or the surf are too high, I simply don’t launch the boat, but there are a lot of boats out on the water that aren’t easily removed and so need safe mooring locations.

Another fascinating thing for me about where we now live is that the winds seem to come from all different locations. In my going up years the winds always blew from the west or perhaps the northwest if conditions were right. The flow of air was directed by mountains that were always in the same place. Out here, however, we can experience winds from all four directions. Right now the winds are primarily out of the south which means that the temperate is mild, around 50 degrees for an overnight low. But there are days when the wind comes directly from the west and other days when it blows from the east. Although the primary flow of air is off of the ocean towards the mountains to the east, the biggest waves in our little bay come when the winds are blowing the opposite direction.

I remember when I first moved to North Dakota. I would wander downtown and have coffee in the local cafe that was generally filled with farmers and local business persons at mid morning. I found it to be a good way to connect with the members of the congregation I was serving. In those days the most popular topic was the weather. I wanted to be a caring and connected pastor, but I found constant conversation about the weather to be a bit boring. I would occasionally complain to my colleagues stating the the weather is always unusual around here. I could go to the cafe on any day in any weather and hear someone say how unusual the weather was. In the winter it was colder than usual, though the blizzards weren’t as severe as they were years ago. Everyone in North Dakota has to have a wild blizzard story. We lived there for 7 years. I’ve got a few good stories of my own now.

The years have passed. I’m now seventy and retired. I could hang out at a local cafe and sip coffee in the mornings. I don’t happen to do that. I’m less likely to be found in such a place than I was when I was actively working. Sitting around and talking about the weather isn’t any more interesting to me than it was when I was younger. I do, however, find myself writing about the weather in my journal more than I expected would be the case. One of the barriers to reading some of the old family journals that are now in my custody is that while I come from a long line of journal writers, I also come from a long line of people who recorded the weather. Day after day, my relatives recorded the weather in the places they found themselves. I think I have a pretty accurate record of the weather in Fort Benton, Montana for the turn of the 20th century if anyone is interested, but I doubt that even a weather historian would find all of those entries reporting the weather to be very interesting. Of course they lack specificity. “Frigid temperatures” isn’t a specific term any more than “the wind howled all night long.”

I’m not sure that I would describe the wind as howling. Mostly it is notable because it is coming in gusts. There will be calm moments followed by a blast of wind that makes a roar. The gusts are irregular and I’m sure the conditions would be unsettling for someone trying to wait out the storm out on the open ocean.

There are all kinds of important things going on in the world, but right now the thing that comes to mind is the wind. Even so, I don’t miss the calm quiet of Boise the way I missed the wind when I lived there.