Marq de Villiers - Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather

CONTENTS

The story of Hurricane Ivan: It began, asthese things so often do, long ago and far, far away. Long ago, at least, in thereckoning of weathermen, and far away at least as seen from the Caribbeanand the east coast of North America, where the storm's full fury would indue time be unleashed. In the course of its tumultuous and destructive life,the cyclone they came to call Ivan would exemplify all the perilous uncertaintiesand complex patterns of global climatology (and exaggerate my ownrather paranoid view of hard weather), but its beginning was hidden, evensecretive, and could only be seen in rueful hindsight.

In the spring of 2004, it rained in Darfur, the Sudanese hellhole wrackedby decades of civil war. Darfur is on the southeastern fringes of the endlessemptiness of the Sahara, and its soil, beaten down from too many cattle andtoo many goats over too many years of drought, couldn't hold the water. Itpooled and then gathered in little muddy torrents that swept away the scatteredhuts of the countryside. A few days before, the refugees in their grimcamps had been dying of thirstan ostrich egg of water having to do for afamily for a whole daybut were now forced to scramble to keep their patheticscraps offood and their meager possessions from washing away. Theywere still starving, though now sodden and burdened with cholera and dysentery in addition to their other miseries.

All along the Sahel, the southern fringes of the Sahara, the rains came. Lake Chad, which had been shrinking for decades, stopped shrinking briefly, and the remaining hippo channels winding through the papyrus and water hyacinths filled up. The dusty plains north of Kano, the Nigerian trading city, looked lush for the first time in fifteen years. Outside fabled Timbuktu the ground took on a shiny green sheen, before the goats in their insatiable hunger nibbled the new plants down to a stubble, then trampled the residue into the mud. In Niger, Mali, even in ever-arid Mauritania, the rains fell for the first time in a decade. Not enough, really, to unparch the desert, but more than usual.

No one in the Sahel knew why it was raining, or, except for a few aid agencies, cared; they were just grateful the water was there. In the outside world hardly anybody paid much attention. There were a few exceptionsthe paranoid actuaries for the giant insurance company Munich Re, for example, who are paid to worry, and a few analysts in hurricane centers across the Atlantic, who were wrestling with the complex causative cycles of violent weatherbut more people should have been concerned than that, for they were about to get a brutal lesson in the interconnectedness of natural systems. Who would have thought that, say, a rural tavern in Pennsylvania would be threatened by a storm-born flood that was linked in complicated ways to the ending of a drought half a world away? But the green shoots peeping through the sand in the wadis near Timbuktu meant really bad news for the oblivious citizens of Florida and Alabama and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and bad, though not quite so dire, news for the citizens of the eastern seaboard all the way up to Nova Scotia, where I live. Theywewould learn that in due time.

T he search for an understanding of wind and the weather it brings has been a constant of human history, for wind is a changeling that can bring blessings but also hard times. Wind can be soft and beguiling, seductive; the caress of a gentle breeze stroking the skin is one of the great pleasures of the human adaptation to our natural world. But sometimes wind can be deadly, intensifying violently into a kind of personal malevolence. Like a short-tempered and belligerent god, the wind has a power that can appear arbitrary, excessive, overwhelming, devastating, uprooting trees, wrecking houses, sinking ships, battering people, scarring psyches.

At least, it can seem malevolent, and the malevolence can seem personal.

Out at sea at the southern tip of Africa near the Cape of Storms (which is what the Cape of Good Hope was called before the early colonizers' public relations flacks issued a "clarification"), the collision of two ocean currents sends massive pulses of disturbed air into the sky. The Benguela current, still chilled by the Antarctic frosts, and the Agulhas current, still humid with tropical warmth, intersect just southeast of Cape Town, and the storms they cause coil and twist, boiling up great black thunderheads, tearing the surface off the sea with a howling roar, and assaulting the land beyond. The gales race across the Cape Peninsula and blast out to sea again, across Table Bay to the open Atlantic beyond, where they finally lose their potency in the frigid waters off Namibia. On just such a day, on the spacious lawns of Sea Point on Table Bay, the winds seized a helpless child and knocked him down onto the grass, gratuitously, brutally, effortlessly. He struggled to his feet and yelled for help, but the gale snatched his breath away and blew it out to sea, stripping away the sound so no one could hear him, and the yell became a soundless scream. Then a gust punched him to the ground again and took hold and buffeted him toward the edge of the lawn by the shore, where a stone walkway skirted the breakwater and the rocks below, slippery with weeds and needle sharp with barnacles, pounded by breakers coming in from the sea. In the grip of the gale, the child skidded across the grass until he landed with a crack against the metal railings that were all that prevented him from being hurled into the ocean... It was there that my mother came, and fetched me away, and tried to still my terror with her beating heart.