Against the wind

      When I moved to western Oklahoma many years ago, I immediately telephoned my mother to tell her three things: first, I hadn't picked up a hitchhiker who murdered me; second, I didn't have a wreck; and third, even if I had been in a wreck, I had worn clean underwear. These being her major worries, I felt that I had put her mind at ease.
      In that first conversation, I remember saying, "Boy, the wind sure does blow out here."
      "Don't worry about it," she said. "Summer's coming, and the wind will stop. You'll miss it." She was thinking about the summers where I was reared. The summers there (there being on the Oklahoma side of the Arkansas River Valley) are hot and humid with only the faintest breeze to stir the curtains (not that you have the windows open since you're plastered to the front of the air conditioner if you have at least the intelligence of gravel).
      That first conversation was in May. By February of the next year, I realized that the wind was not going to die. When I think of western Oklahoma now that I have escaped, I think of the unceasing wind. It whistled and howled and roared across that flat land, picking up speed and red dirt and an occasional small car, and it never stopped.
      I once mentioned this to a friend as we walked down a street in front of a drugstore.
      "Doesn't it ever let up?" I asked, dodging a tumbleweed.
      "I guess I'm so used to it, I don't notice," he said as he deftly caught a small child who was being blown past and then handed her to her mother.
      The child's mother thanked us and then told her daughter, "See what happens when you untie your safety brick."
      A few minutes passed as we stared in the drugstore window at an interesting display of moist towelettes and eczema cream.
      "Think we're making any headway?" he finally asked.
      "I don't know," I said. "Perhaps when that truck turns the corner, it'll block the breeze."
      My father, who spent a fair amount of time in western Oklahoma, liked the wind. "It keeps the towns clean," he'd say. "All the trash just blows away."
      That comment has always made me think that some town in Kansas really has a trash problem.
      Actually, what Kansas really has is quite a bit of Oklahoma. The unrelenting wind carries away thousands of tons of rich Oklahoma topsoil yearly. On certain days, the soil colors the western Oklahoma sky a deep red -- as it does your face, your car and anything else outside. Eventually all of Oklahoma will be in Kansas -- which, other than tornadoes, is not a bad place to live if you like corn and girls named Dorothy.
      During the summer, when the temperature is in the three digits, the wind makes you feel like you're in a rotisserie oven. You can hear your sweat evaporate. And during the winter, wind chill takes on the importance of football scores.
      Still for all this, the wind does have its good points. It provides jobs for the makers of skin lotions and lip balms. By kicking dust into the atmosphere, it provides for stunning sunsets and spectacular dawns. It powers windmills and quite a few wind turbines which provide a surprising amount of electricity. An excellent ecological idea would be to erect turbines everywhere there is a lot of wind, although Congress probably wouldn't like them in their chambers.
      The western Oklahoma wind also puts you in touch with your roots. As you stand there, braced against its force, striving to take another step, straining grit out of the air with your teeth, your clothes snapping around like a whip, your hat on a trip to the ocean, you feel just like a brave and hearty pioneer of ages past: You wonder what in world are you doing out there and just how soon can you get out.