Wind

A few years ago, I was training for a marathon, so I did a lot of running among the wide, flat agricultural plats of Southern Illinois. A summer drought had devastated the cornfields, and many of the farmers had cut their losses early and cashed in their insurance policies, surrendering their harvests to the earth, plowing the half-grown, yellowed stalks underground. The heat wave continued through July, and all month long my children and I watched as dust devils marched through the razed cornfield behind our home that faced the sunrise, an endless succession of miniature tornadoes moving south to north a half-mile to the west along the gently sloping highest ridge of flat Richland County, where a sizable share of the world's corn is grown.

The wind was relentless out there among the open fields. The natural windbreaks had all been cut down, the creek beds filled, and field tile planted to make room for a few more acres of corn and soybeans. Farm trucks and tractors kicked up dust along the gravel roads that billowed into the sky, wafting over the yard and sneaking into the house through the screens of opened windows or cracked seals on doorways, settling, at last, on picture frames and cabinets that required non-stop dusting. A wind chime on the front porch rang all summer, mixing with the low, muffled growl of wind that swept incessantly across lobe and eardrum.

Bubbling blacktop met my footsteps in a rhythm of slap and thud as I set out for a five-mile run in the hot, early afternoon. The wind that swept across the terrain from the cloudless blue skies kept me moderately cool beneath the hot glow of the summertime sun that burned my shoulders and the back of my neck. My long, brown hair was swept northward by the southerly winds, keeping my vision clear as I ran along the westbound road. As I jogged up the gentle ridge, I noticed a fully formed dust devil dancing northward toward me. My heart beat harder as I saw that I would meet this phenomenon of nature as it crossed the road if I quickened my pace just a little.

Sucking wind into my lungs, I firmed my resolve to run harder than my body wanted for just a hundred yards or so, watching as a thin column of dust and cornstalks swirled hundreds of feet into the sky ran across the land. The vortex seemed to have only one will: to continue in its journey, unconcerned with obstacle or destination.

In the final moments, the twister left the field and crossed a ditch filled with high-grown sedge that waved erratically as it was sucked and blown by this spirit of the earthen sky. The same blew through my hair and across my skin, and I exhilarated in a moment of bliss inside the vortex of the devil wind.

The moment lasted five seconds. Perhaps ten. Though running westward still, I turned my head to the north to see the devil continue into the northern field, and I asked myself why I had so quickly passed through this wind. Why it had so quickly moved into another field. It was not moving so fast. As fast as a human runner, it seemed. I stopped and jumped across the grassy ditch, in chase of the dust devil I had just encountered.

I saw the wind before me, sweeping up corn leaves and detritus from the new-plowed fields, and I tried to catch up to the fury that had already moved a few dozen yards from me. I had willed myself to catch it once, and surely I could catch it again. But my feet sank into the dry tillage, and with each labored step I took, the distance between us increased. My eyes were set on the object, and I gave no thought to surrender. I ran a few hundred yards through the loose soil as my lungs and quadriceps burned, but my will would not release them from their duty to obey until I saw the twister disappear into a cluster of trees at the other end of the farmer's field, across which I was trespassing.

I stopped in the middle of the field and bent over, panting, hands on quads, eyes looking forward, into the trees.

I stood there for a moment and contemplated my situation. I had run far from the road through loose soil, and running back to where I had left the road seemed as difficult a chore as turning westward again to meet a crossroad that had been my destination in the first place, so I decided, at last, to face disappointment and admit defeat as I lumbered, more slowly, across the unstable ground to the road that lay a few hundred yards before me.

Lifting my legs high above the dirt clods and corn stalks, I wrestled a lesson in my mind. Had I been foolish to chase the wind? Why had I not simply enjoyed the moment as it was, and allowed it to pass when it passed? Why did I struggle through the empty field, commanding my body to experience such pain in a futile effort? I knew that I could not have run in that wind forever.

The answer to these questions was obvious, of course. I saw the goal. I had disciplined my body to meet the goal, and I had been awarded with a few moments of bliss. I had always wondered what it would feel like on the inside of a twister, and I had been afforded an opportunity to learn. For this I was certainly thankful. And I began to contemplate how it had felt as I trudged through the last few dozen yards of the plowed field.

It had felt like wind.

It was wind that my eyes could see, or at least see the evidence of. But in the end, it was only wind. A firm but gentle dancing wind. A quick wind that was in no hurry.

At last, I came to the edge of the field and jumped across a grassy ditch onto a gravel road that ran north and south. I turned southward and began my journey home.

And then, it hit me.

A mighty, invisible wind. A strong and incessant wind. A wind that did not cease. A strong headwind, more powerful, more obvious, than the dust devils that danced across the barren fields in illusory dresses of powder and maize.

I had not noticed this headwind when my back had been turned to it, and I had not considered how I had been running in the current of this powerful force as I chased the devil across still and empty fields. Facing the ceaseless wind, my heart sank, for home was miles away, and running would be harder from now on.

But I turned and felt the wind, and labored the long road home.