The good in a nemesis - #151
Learning to deal with these godforsaken winds.
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When we were looking for a place to call home, one of my hopes was that it wouldn’t be windy. The whip of hair against your face, ever in your mouth. The tiniest grain of earth clung to the wet of your eyelid, summoning its brethren. Fingers of mean, cold breath lashing away fabric. These are the great evils, and I would not live with them.
But there is a difference between a place being windy and a place having wind. Had I moved to this valley ten years earlier, I might’ve seen the handful of t-shirts made in homage of the local weather. The t-shirts named the town and then, like a tagline to a movie, they read: “it blows.”
The wind here is not a breeze. It is not the salty wind off the coast, making Riesling taste good. It is not the welcome reprieve on a hot day or the spooky whip of an October night. No, the wind here is worse than that. It is not a battalion, not a regiment, not even a brigade. It is the entire army, and it is an ambush.
It is not windy here because the wind is saving its strength for when it tries to ruin your life.
There are tougher people than me, and all of them live here. They hear these winds and put on their base layers and their middle layers and their layers that go on top of those layers before employing the “double puffy” and starting their climbs out of the valley to go backcountry skiing. I, however, am in my porous house with my wrist-numbing laptop realizing that if I want to keep the fire going, I have to open the door to the wind to get more wood. If I open the door, the house drops to 56 degrees. If I don’t open the door, the fire goes out, and the house drops to 56 degrees. At least the fire adds ambiance.
For a long time I considered these winds my enemy. But having enemies is tiresome. The pressure to defeat or be defeated is simply too much for a person just trying to put their feet on the cold, bare floor in the morning because the cat peed on the rug one too many times. Instead, I have decided to make the winds my nemesis.
The winds are not a bad guy out to get me. Wind has a purpose, which is the key to a good nemesis: they need to fundamentally believe they are right. And I mean, they are. They are regulating the global weather patterns, while I am a woman trying to nap her baby. It’s not exactly an intergalactic tale of ongoing triumph and defeat where every once in a while you wonder if maybe the protagonist and the nemesis might just share one itty bitty little kiss. This is just me trying to keep bodies warm in a poorly sealed house.
The point of a nemesis lies in the fact that, unlike an enemy, they can’t be overcome. That is both their evil and their virtue, that you will continue dealing with them in perpetuity. They are the Road Runner to your Coyote, the Jerry to your Tom. You can, of course, admit defeat, accept them as an enemy that has clobbered you into ruin, but like a sibling in the backseat of a long drive, they’ll find a way to provoke you back into the game. It just takes time.
And in this valley, I have lots and lots of time.
So instead of being the Coyote, forever to be outwitted by a bird just being a bird, I’m going to let myself be the wind’s natural prey, and do what prey does best: hunker. Just for a bit.
In
’s How to Winter, she talks at length in various sections of the book about how your mindset determines your enjoyment of inclement weather. There was an AP news story a couple weeks back that made me think of it: “A double dose of nasty winter is about to smack much of the US with snow, ice and biting cold.” Nasty! Smack! Biting! (Not necessarily bad, if you’re into that, but I don’t think that’s the point the article was making.) Now imagine this title with a bit of a mindset shift: A hearty dose of awe-inspiring winter is about to blanket much of the US with an opportunity to drink cocoa by the fire with a good book. Some people might say this wouldn’t drive clicks, but the children yearn for hygge.There’s another northern latitude word though that winds inspire, and Leibowitz shared it in her book: gluggaveður, the Icelandic word for “window weather.” These photos are taken from the same window, same view. I’ll let you surmise which one I consider window weather.
It’s not like I wouldn’t go outside in this. I would! The point of a nemesis is not to always hunker. For the series to have legs, you’ve gotta put up a fight with some regularity. But I do have to invoke my friend Taylor to do it. The wind chuckles warmly when it thinks of Taylor. She is the kind of person who willingly jumped out of an airplane as some sort of sick (both meanings) audition to get her job. The job is based in Norway, mind you, because you obviously can’t make someone jump out of an airplane for a job in the US unless that’s literally the job. Taylor lives by the ethos that there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. It turns out this saying is also based in Norway, as I found out in How to Winter: Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær!
Det sounds suspiciously like winter propaganda to me, but that’s what winter needs: a publicist.
The wind doesn’t howl, she whistles! The wind doesn’t blow your house down, she merely tempers it like hot soup on a spoon. Does she bite, though? No! What a silly thing to say! She merely nips like a puppy eager to show their love.
The key to being the Road Runner and not the Coyote in this relationship though is how much you care. You can’t care. When you start to care too much, you become the Coyote, making a fool of yourself fighting an adversary that can’t be beaten. You’ve gotta do the work to turn “Nasty winter” into “window weather.” You’ve gotta be and believe the publicist.
W3 has a book called Play in Any Weather, and there’s a section that reads: “Wind blows, hat flies”. It is the only weather in the book depicted as openly antagonistic. While the sun shines you get bright smiles and while the clouds float you somehow soar, but wind? She’ll steal the hat right off your fucking head, kid. Better watch your back.
But this is the wind’s game. She’s mischievous! She is like a puppy, making a mess and then suddenly turning into a gentle breeze pushing the clouds away looking up at you like, me????
My enemies are simpler, more pure in their villainy: speeding in town, motorized vehicles of most kinds in the backcountry, big cat hunters. They are not a part of my Saturday morning cartoon relationship. They are big screen, big budget baddies, and I don’t need to learn to work with them. I only need to bemoan them.
The wind, though? I’ve got to give her credit. She’s constantly breaking into this house, and I am constantly feeding the fire. When I finally summon my inner Taylor and take to the outside, the wind is the first to say hello, dropping snowflakes on my lashes. She whips and she whirls and she delivers a bouquet of pine and the smell of every fireplace in town churning to keep her at bay.
You can, if you allow it, feel her pride. The sound she makes as she runs through the trees is called psithurism; it is onomatopoeic. The word slithers through your teeth like she does through the needles. And I think you can tell what she’s saying:
“They built the fires for me.”
That optimism alone could make me love her. Enemies to lovers is a trope for a reason. Maybe we’re halfway there.
But for now, I hunker. Let her set her traps and her cons. I’m a bird just being a bird, and I’m not going to fall for it simply because she’s taunting me. I am enjoying my window weather, rocking a baby to the crackle of the fire.
She’s at least right about that — I did build it for her.
Mary and I live in Livingston just north of Yellowstone National Park. The wind in Livingston is like the wind you experience. It easily hits 40-50 mph gusts on rough days. When we first moved here, we stayed inside and out of the wind. But we have learned how to deal with the wind. When the winds calms down, we stop what we're doing and get outside. This has made the wind much less of an enemy and more of a creature that schedules our lives. I can live with that.
I have called the wind my nemesis for much of my life, but if I thought the Santa Anas were bad, they’re nothing like ABQ/New Mexico winds. The wind here is an actual entity, and while she may still be my nemesis, I’ve come to see her as almost goddess-like. I bow to her power, because I don’t want my head taken off by a rogue stop sign flying through the streets. (Det almost happened to my acupuncturist, and det is skörry.)