Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather
By Marq de Villiers
McClelland & Stewart, 338 pages. $34.99
In the task of writing a book about the mysterious force that moves clouds about, bends trees and frightens horses, Marq de Villiers has an advantage of sorts, beyond his well-known gift for storytelling. It is a certain familiarity, an intimacy with the subject that comes from having had an astonishing lifelong run of ill luck, wind-wise.
When he was a child, de Villiers was knocked down by a fierce wind that skidded him across a field at Table Bay, on South Africa's Atlantic Coast, and nearly tossed him into the sea. Shortly after his family moved to Johannesburg, a killing tornado roared through the city. While riding a motorcycle across the Great Karoo veldt, de Villiers was chased for three terrifying hours by a violent, raging thunderstorm.
When he lived in Ontario, a freak tornado singled out de Villiers's backcountry woodland lot, tearing up maple trees and beech trees and dropping them in a jumbled heap. The surrounding forest was unscathed. While he was attending a conference in Arizona, a tornado ripped through town only half a kilometre away, demolishing buildings and tossing trucks around.
The west Port Dalhousie pier in St. Catharines, Ont. takes a beating from high winds. (Denis Cahill/CP)
After de Villiers moved to Eagle Head, N.S., a storm tore out a wooden walkway between his house and the beach, and by Sept. 21, 2004, he was already well into the research for Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather. He'd already filled a file folder with printed bulletins on Hurricane Ivan, the tempest that had just finished churning up waves the size of 12-storey buildings and killing dozens of people from the Caribbean to the Maritimes. That evening, the winds began to howl and the sea started smashing against the rocks outside de Villiers's house. It was Hurricane Ivan.
Against this rather creepy background, de Villiers — whose book Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, won a Governor-General's Award — sets out to make sense of the wind, where it comes from, how it works and what it does.
He starts by following Hurricane Ivan from its springtime emergence in the sands of the Sudan, and its deceptively commonplace journey across the Atlantic, to its lethal trajectory through the Gulf of Mexico and up through the Eastern Seaboard to Nova Scotia.
But de Villiers tells Ivan's story only a few hundreds words at a time, in italics, at the beginning of each of the book's seven chapters. This doesn't provide an especially robust narrative arc for the book, and Windswept takes on a wholly unrelated trajectory anyway, beginning with the ways in which wind has been imagined in myth and story, through time, from preliterate peoples to the classical philosophers. From there, the book follows the evolution of modern meteorology, and the breathtaking pace at which technology is taking science in its understanding of wind and weather.
Along the way, the reader is occasionally marched through disorienting minutiae, which ends up in what reads like an obligatory chapter on global warming. The book rather peters out in a final chapter that's something of a mélange: a history of sailing, a bit about the way an airplane's wing works and a foray into debates and controversies about the prospects for wind-generated electricity.
Still, de Villiers is a tremendous raconteur, and when the book is slightly clunky, he gets away with it. Taken as just a collection of essays, Windswept still delights and surprises.
It turns out that all the fancy digital imagery that accompanies television weather broadcasts is still assembled mainly from raw data cobbled together from hundreds of little balloons sent up into the sky, twice a day, from far-flung weather stations. And there really is some truth to that old saw about how the smell of things is more noticeable just before a storm. As it happens, scents are released in conditions of low air pressure.
It also turns out that sand borne by winds from the Sahara cause fish-killing algae blooms in the waters around Florida, and that clouds of pollution have been found to contain human dandruff, flakes of skin and fur fibres. Some wind-savvy albatrosses sleep during flight and circumnavigate the Earth twice a year, and Gerry Forbes, the head of the Environment Canada station on Sable Island, likes the lift that gales give him when he runs along the beach. They let him leap 10 metres and more in a single bound.
In spite of everything we have come to know about wind, the mysteries persist. We may never be able to detect, for instance, the critical events that conjure hurricanes and tornados from mere dust devils. It's the little things, most likely — even a flock of birds could do it, in a pinch.
With all the sophistication of satellite-borne scatterometers, the super-sensitive instrumentation at mountaintop weather stations and high-altitude storm-reconnaissance flights, there is also a guy named Herb, with a single-sideband radio, in Burlington, Ont., who stays up late at night, broadcasting volunteer, amateur weather forecasts. Every night, as many as 1,000 mariners tune in. They listen very closely to everything Herb has to say.
Herb Hilgenberg, 69, has a knack for forecasting. He takes routine reports about wind and sea conditions from his loyal listeners, digests weather reports from all the official sources, crunches the data and broadcasts his findings. Every night. For free. On Hilgenberg's wall is a plaque from the very grateful crew of a U.S. Naval Training Squadron that was involved in a 1992 Newport-to-Bermuda yacht race, famously bedevilled by contradictory predictions about a gale that was haunting the sea at the time. Where all the experts were wrong, Herb got it right. "To Herb Hilgenberg," the plaque reads, "for Best Analysis of North Atlantic Weather and Sea Conditions."
In Windswept, de Villiers marshals all his talents to the cause of making plain the things that the best scientists have a hard time explaining, and the things that most writers tend to avoid as impossibly complicated. But it's the simple stories, like the story about Herb Hilgenberg, that de Villiers tells best. The wind's mysteries persist, and whatever Windswept's sophistication or its flaws, it's in the simple stories that the book is wholly redeemed.
Terry Glavin's new book is Waiting for the Macaws: And Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions.
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