Give me wind. Maybe not the howling gale that keeps Great Falls listing to the east. Maybe not the bully gusts that stiff-arm semis off the road. Maybe not fire winds, the ominous, searing furnace breath of summer. Maybe not blizzards and their relentless, gravity-defying blasts of sideways snow. But give me wind that talks in the pines and shivers through aspen and chatters around cottonwoods. Give me the wind that still blows through Montana clean and clear, without the tints and tinctures of pollution. That coursing through Montana, keeps us pink and mauve at twilight and blue and green and gold at noon.
In this land-bound kingdom, the wind is our sea—our bellows—our lungs. It’s the tide that ebbs and flows and brings some larger worlds to us. The insidious wheeze of West Coast smoke or the meteorological cough that scours our valleys clear of such soot. The glacial gasp of a Polar Express that slides down from Canada—reaching across our most permeable political borders. And the friendly, easy warmth that starts some summer day out in the Pacific.
In our internet age, we’ve color-coded the wind. The National Weather Service serves up a rainbow palette of atmospheric elements. There are intuitive ones: green for flooding; bright red for fire wind. But the variations of breezes come in shades of beige and brown, lavender and salmon: high wind; lake wind; wind advisories; gales. Technicolor warnings of the very element we cannot see.
There is that old question more relevant to Montana than my growing up Kansas: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound. And I’m thinking tonight of all the thousands upon thousands of hills turned first red and then muddy brown by pine beetles. The millions of trees too abundant even for our most colossal tree eaters and stompers and slicers. Out where the wind must miss the needles that used to give it pleasant voice. We’ve given the beetles a larger than usual canvas on which to chew crimson across the West and now those trees speak with rustle and creak and the sharp crack of death. Even when we’re not there.
I’ve lived in the lands of summer thunderstorms, where we didn’t notice wind until it emerged from a towering thunderhead, and once in a while, became a rolling funnel. I’ve lived in the lands of deep humidity, where the line between rain and heavy air was barely discernible and we begged for the breath of a breeze. I’ve lived in the land of coastal rain that, for all its ocean-sister tempests, seemed to fall on us with no warning and no wind. Here, on a very restless October night that’s picked our trees clean of dead leaves and needles, I’ll take Montana every time.
Soughing is an old-fashioned word, but one perfect for so many our winds. As is “Mariah” – the sound itself of wind in pine. I’ve never heard rain being called Tess or fire called Joe, as the Paint Your Wagon lyrics insist. I may be a latecomer to the region or a novice in the naming of the earth’s elemental forces. But “Mariah” for the wind–spoken as Montanans call the River or the Pass– spoken with a sigh for an “i” and an “aaaah” outbreath—IS the wind. An onomatopoeia of our restless airborne tides.
I’ve lived, too, in the land of the very old, the sick, and dying. I’m moving there soon myself. And so often, I find those worlds sealed up against the outside air. Heavy drapes and dim lights, windows shuttered tightly against sun and breeze. A stale, preternatural hush. Maybe we fear chilling those already frail. Maybe we just fear. So we banish the universal, elemental breath on which we all rode in. And on which we’ll glide out. Please no! Give me wind. Open up the house! Let a serious Montana tempest come find me. Let Mariah blow me to the stars. ©
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The odds are good that you’re too young to know the 1951 Lerner and Lowe Broadway musical “Paint Your Wagon” or the 1969, much altered film version with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Never mind our mid-century taste for musicals and Westerns, somehow this production missed the mark of both fads. And truth be told, I never saw either. But I knew and loved one song from it: “They Call the Wind Mariah.” I recommend that you let Robert Goulet stalk up to the top of his movie-set ridge and his bottle-brush pines and take you away: They Call the Wind Mariah
A way out here they got a name for rain and wind and fire
the rain is Tess the fires Joe and they call the wind Mariah
Mariah blows the stars around and sends the clouds a flyin
Mariah makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dying
(Mariah Mariah)
They call the wind Mariah
Efore I knew Mariah’s name and heard her wail and whining
I had a girl and she had me and the sun was always shining
And then one day I left my girl
I left her far behind me
And now I’m lost so gol durn lost
Not even God can find me.
(Mariah Mariah
They call the wind Mariah)
Out here they got a name for rain for wind and fire only but when your lost and all alone there ain’t no word but lonely
And I’m a lost and lonely man without a star to guide me
Mariah blow my love to me
I need my girl beside me
(Mariah Mariah they call the wind Mariah)
Mariah Mariah
Blow my love to me
