Winds Without Names

I was unprepared for my first dust storm. The wind was disorienting and incessant and the light had turned swampy. I was alone and looking for my camp. The dust was fine and bitter like baking soda and I was squinting and blinking to try and keep it out of my eyes. I hadn’t thought much about wind until that storm. Then I moved to Utah, and got to know other winds, became intimate with a strange variety of them. My experiences with wind made me think about something a college anthropology professor once said. We were talking about Native American cultures of the southwest desert, and the professor said that the people who came from the harshest environments tended to have the most complex ritual lives. Think about it, she said.

That first dust storm was during my first year at Burning Man. For all the other things you may have heard about Burning Man, the dust storms are at the heart it.  The week before Labor Day, forty thousand people come to the cracked alkali playa of the Black Rock desert, where nothing grows and nothing lives the rest of the year. It is hot during the day, cold at night, and it is periodically blasted with silt-filled wind that rolls in in 100-foot walls of dust. The dust turns the world blurry, tearing at tents and fabric, turning art brown, air brown, skin and clothes chalky. During that week, the festival is the 4^th largest city in Nevada, filled with the highest concentration of art and creativity in the world. It is also an incredibly harsh environment. The back of the ticket warns, “You could die at Burning Man.” A bumper sticker I saw on someone’s car last year read, “My vacation is your worst nightmare.”

I knew that there was no reason to panic, but I couldn’t find my camp and the wind was relentless. Everyone had stopped and gone away—zipped their tents and locked themselves in their RVs. I knew that I was within two blocks of my camp but nothing looked the same in the dust and my camp was not where I thought it should be. I didn’t have goggles or a mask with me, so I was covering my face and half the time walking through the streets with my eyes closed. Everything had gone a gritty sepia, like my life was happening in the past. I felt alone and lost and was fighting a panic I hadn’t felt since being lost in a mall when I was five.

Then it occurred to me that there were people everywhere. That there were thousands of people packed tightly into tents and trailers all around me in neatly organized plots and streets and that they could help me if I wasn’t afraid of them. I didn’t know these people and I didn’t understand the culture, but when I saw a couple sitting under an awning in front of their tents, I stumbled over and asked if I could sit with them for a second.

“Sure!” they said, and I was shocked to find they seemed to be enjoying themselves, all wrapped in masks and goggles, and happy to see me as if I was the first to arrive at their cocktail party. If they were making offerings to the gods, they seemed to think the gods preferred margaritas.

In The English Patient, Michael Ondaaje writes:

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defind themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. [Winds] traveling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads.

The dust storms in the Black Rock desert do not have names. So few of our winds do. The big winds we must name. Hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes. When faced with a very fierce wind, it is strange to even call it wind, a tornado seems not even kin to the laundry-ruffling breeze. Tornadoes seem more closely related to the whip-tailed village-eating dragon than they do the zephyr. It is different to think of “tornado” as a concept than to actually experience a tornado. We try and contain the concept with a sort of a mental caricature of the thing, whereas the actual thing is uncontainable and wild.

One time in Canada, I had a brush with a tornado. It was night, and there were eight of us in a cottage on a lake. After diner it started to rain. And then the winds picked up and threw the rain sideways at the little shack, and shook the windows, and ripped screaming through the cracks in the boards. We pressed together on the floor, away from the windows. We didn’t know the storm was a tornado, and yet I still wanted a hole to crawl into, some tiny space to hide in, away from the shaking walls. In the morning, we all got into a little motorboat and passed a cottage—just up the lake—whose roof had been peeled off. We passed a row of pines that had been cleanly topped as if by a giant saw. All the neighbors were chattering excitedly and telling stories of their nights as they pulled branches, rafts, and bits of dock from their yards.

We don’t usually name the smaller, odder, winds at all, and unnamed we leave them open for more intimate experiences. Once, driving down Parley’s Canyon in spring, I met a wind like a giant puppy, playful and powerful, tossing me a two-by-four and denting my bumper, kicking up sand and tiny rocks, pitting my windshield so it picked up the light and looked as if it were coated in gold glitter. I have heard of a little area in the desert of southern Utah with a wind so relentless and irritating that it fills the space between lovers and pushes them away from each other, out of the town, the state, separation caused by wind but evidenced by the town’s high divorce rate. Down in Boulder, Utah, where the locals hang Tibetan prayer flags, the wind mows through prayers faster than just about anywhere else on earth, sending out great gusts of them. The wind flaps the flags so fast they sound like bees. It quickly shreds the Tibetan flags, then picks up the American flags and prays with those, too. Along the Escalante Staircase the winds are patient like water, flowing steadily over the soft flesh of the desert, revealing the smooth bones beneath, leaving the mountains’ eye socket arches and femurish hoodoos.

While many people compare the red rock landscape of Southern Utah to Mars, but Martian winds more awful than anything we have on Earth. The wind grabs dust and turns it into massive clouds that absorb the sunlight and heat the atmosphere. The storms can engulf the entire planet, getting larger and more terrible as they pull up dirt like water but with no actual water they rain only dust. These winds have names, but they are names spoken in Martian, which is a language spoken only by the Martian winds themselves

But I have been meaning to tell you about river rafting.

Last summer I was on an extended honeymoon rafting the Green River through Desolation and Gray Canyons. My new husband, Jared, and I were in an inflatable kayak, which in rafter speak is called a ducky. We had friends spread out over the river with us in three big rafts and two other duckies.

The first stretch of river was supposed to be long and boring, a slow uneventful day of drifting. But a few miles in the wind started blowing upstream, turning the current choppy and slowing us down. Our friends in the rafts settled into it, leaning their backs into the wind, facing upstream, the men pulling long strokes with their oars, the women sitting quietly in front.

It is nice, sometimes, to be in intense weather in what seems like a big pool toy with your partner. One of you may get moody or grouchy about it, and the other of you will snap you out of it by making a funny observation. You try to avoid commiseration, because you would both very quickly become miserable if all you did was point out that you were sitting in six inches of cold river water and you couldn’t feel your toes anymore. Or that the wind was blowing so hard the current wasn’t moving you forward.

What does not kill you gives you character. Character usually floods the place left in the wake of panic, fear, or recurring grouchiness.

The wind was getting stronger, the crazy backward waves bigger, each gust pushing us toward the tamarisk-filled banks and then releasing us just long enough to get back into the “current” and paddle a little further.

Jared and I were laughing at it by then. It was ridiculous. The waves seemed funny, the wind driving us back upriver even as we paddled as hard as we could to keep moving forward.

And then we rounded a bend in the river and our situation changed entirely. It was a part of the river where the canyon walls pinched the wind and it was, impossibly, windier. We fought our way forward, inching along the banks, getting pushed into the tamarisks and then dragging the ducky back out to move forward a few yards before getting shoved back again.

And then the wind changed into something that really should have a name but does not. It was not a small, intimate wind; it was a thing, a big thing. When I saw it I thought of a tornado, but it did not swirl. It moved like a snake but looked like a wall, this wind had volume and texture and opacity.

“That thing is coming at us!” my husband yelled from behind me.

“This is absurd,” I yelled back. We were both giddy and laughing at the absurdity of it still, which is nice, because we could have been terrified and whimpering and that would have been appropriate, too.

We watched the wind wall hit our friend up ahead, his ducky slammed into the bank, his white button-down shirt flying straight out behind him like a cape, his head lowered into the wind and his hair whipping back as if the ducky were an open-cockpit plane.

And it kept coming, white and violent, diagonally down the river and hit us and I howled and Jared howled to greet it as it slapped us hard into the bank and the wind was full of hundreds of tiny shards of river that it hurled at us, which we didn’t expect. I hunched over my arms, gripping my paddle, and clenching my eyes shut, trying to bury my face and cover my ears from the stinging drops.

When it passed, we were soaked and panting and had just enough time to look upriver and see another wall of wind, and our friend’s upside-down ducky, and then to yell to give ourselves courage, and then duck, and get whipped around backward so that the other side of us got soaked and stung with the tiny shards. And then we were hit again, and my memory starts changing here because I think this is the point at which you can say the wind will leave you senseless, there was cold, the shards, shivering, worry that the boat would flip, and I can’t say how many more cold walls of wind and water hit us—it may have been two, or it may have been five, before my husband yelled,

“We have to get out of the boat!”

“No!” I yelled, “We can’t get out of the boat! Because… we need the boat!”

“Just get out!” he yelled.

And I fumbled my way out of the ducky and into the mud and as the next hard gust hit I grasped at the tamarisks on the bank, and they grasped back scratching my skin and pulling my sweater. I hadn’t realized I was so cold until I tried to stand and my legs were shaking hard, and my fingers were stupid and numb as I tried to untangle myself and rip my sweater free from the branches. When I did, I burrowed into the mud at the base of the tamarisk and curled around myself in a ball, closing my eyes against the wind, covering my ears, my face, my fingers and legs which seemed missing from numbness, and yes, that is how wind can make you senseless.

A couple minutes later my mate came over and wrapped himself around me, and stayed there for a moment, warm and mammal, shivering hard. Then he said, “come on, get up. It’s better over there.” So we got up and waded back out into the river, clenching hands and bracing against the wind, and made our way up a muddy path, past the ducky that he had dragged up, and past the tamarisks onto the bank where the dry grasses were warm and crisp and the desert sunshine was heating the earth. We flopped down on the ground, shocked that it could be dry anywhere, or warm, shocked to remember that it was a sunny day and what had seemed like rain was just flying river.

When we were warm enough to think and move, we got up and found our people. Everyone was ok. Our friend whose ducky had flipped told us how the wind had flipped him over in the river, and he had had to battle to pull up the ducky and not lose his paddle while he was freezing and pummeled by the air and the water. It is strange to go through something intense, and then realize that the person up ahead had a much harder time of it than you. It causes an instant compassion, I think, with the experience so raw and fresh in you. After something intense happens, like walls of rivery wind, I think the natural response is gratitude, for your own life, for your friends’ lives, and when you tell each other your stories from the event, there’s this network of empathy between you.

Our friend’s seven-year old daughter, along on her first river trip, was so small that when she got onto the bank, the wind had picked her up and slammed her into a boulder, giving her a giant bruise on her thigh that she would proudly show us when she told the story all weekend.

Two friends, a couple, also dove into the muddy tamarisk banks, and while they huddled there, a baseball flew from nowhere and hit him on the head, bounced off and hit her on the head, which surely means something but we have no idea what. Well, it means hurricane-force winds. Later, when we got home, another friend told us that “74 miles an hour is hurricane force,” she pronounced it “hurra-kin” with the authority and familiarity you’d expect of someone who grew up in the Bahamas, which she did. “At about 100 miles an hour heavy things start flying through the air,” she said.

On the river and in the desert wind changes what is important. Wind shrinks the world down to the space just beyond the skin. The dust storms in the Black Rock desert move in with deity-like intensity and rearrange our human sense of scale and volume. They rearrange our belongings and our priorities. In a dust storm the scale of a single human becomes terribly insufficient, our voices ripped away a few inches from our mouths, and so we are left, tiny and muted, to navigate a world we don’t have the capacities for.

In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes about natural disasters’ ability to bring people together. She writes, “The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of, the opposite of merge, which comes from mergere, to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged. An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion.” She argues “solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear in [times of disaster].”

It seems that there may be a relationship between the size of a storm and its ability to bind people together. Big storms, the ones that touch whole communities, have the power to rally people together at a national or international scale. The little storms, the ones experienced by pairs or clusters, may create private intimacies, or create groups where before there were only individuals.

One last dust storm. This one was a couple years and quite a few dust storms after that first one. By then I’d learned how to find my camp at Burning Man. I’d learned to never leave camp without a mask or goggles. I wore scarves to cover my face and hair, and carried enough water for hours. I’d learned to watch the horizon for the billows of dust, and watch which direction they were moving.

So one afternoon, my friend Jacob and I were out at a lecture in a big tent near Center Camp when a dust storm hit. The lecture was canceled, and people hurried back to zip themselves away. Jacob and I decided to go out into the dust storm, though, and walk around the open playa among the art installations. It’s funny how after spending time with something, you can get to know it, and feel a kind of friendliness toward it, even if it is something terrible. In this space, the dust storm felt exhilarating and familiar. We swung by Jacob’s camp on our way, and he grabbed a nice bottle of reposado, and then we fumbled out into the whiteness of the open playa.

Even though there are thousands of people at the event, the center of Burning Man is over a mile across, open and blank except for art installations that people spend months or years building. So in the center, where we went, people are spread far apart, and in the whiteout, the effect was like walking on the moon in a dense fog.

Our initial goal was to find art, but what ended up being much more interesting were the people. The first person we ran into was a man looking a bit like a very dirty Laurence of Arabia who emerged from the dust like a strange vision. “You’re going the wrong way,” he told us dryly. “Whiteout tequila?” Jacob asked him, holding up the bottle. “Bless you,” said the man, taking a slug and walking on. We would find others staggering—alone or in pairs—back toward their camps, clutching cloths over their faces, looking miserable and resigned. “White-out tequila?” Jacob would ask them. Very quickly in a dust storm, strangers become compatriots.

You might think that such and environment would cause chaos and rioting. People feel lost and you might think that the winds would make them crazy, especially in an anarchist environment where they’ve given themselves permission to do anything they like. You might think there’d be looting, or violence, but from what I’ve seen, not at all. Dust storms remind us that we need people, which is easy to forget in our normal lives, with our worlds so secular and walled. I think that there is a specific love of people learned only after you’ve gone through intense winds or weather, and learned something of your own littleness. This could be the reason religion is so rich in places where there are blizzards, or terrible heat, or tornadoes, or dust storms, or cyclones. Maybe people create complex rituals not so much to negotiate with the weather, or the gods who send it in huge billows of dust, or relentless walls down the river at you, but to glue themselves together. People who live in intense environments understand the importance of other people for survival.

Jacob and I found a little shack that was a part of someone’s art project. There were people already huddled inside, eight or ten others who had wandered in to hide and wait it out. They welcomed us in. We passed around tequila. A chalky, dust-covered girl unzipped her camelback and passed around fruit leather. Another girl pulled out some baby wipes and cleaned the dust off our faces, giggling as she swiped the rim of our nostrils and the insides of our ears. Soon we were all talking and telling stories, while around us the shack groaned and shuddered, and outside the wind yowled by.