peculiar magic

a gale & a funeral & a dog singing to sky

At choir, a neighbour tells me that the freshly blooming daffodils are going to be flattened and headless next week because bad weather is coming. She is an islander, born and bred, and so her warning of bad weather is not to be taken lightly. And, of course, she is right. Early Tuesday morning, we are kept awake by a wind that arrives like a granite fist—hammering at the walls, drumming an unsettling, percussive beat throughout the house, gusting open a window, twisting the curtains into a breathless ballet.

At dawn, our weather station reports a base wind speed of 50mph with gusts of 60. Which is by no means the strongest winds we’ve had (last winter, we had gusts of almost 100mph thundering through the garden), but still, a base wind of over 40mph needs some preparation if I am to walk the dog (who has never gone a day without two walks and, judging by the stare he gives me as I assess the weather station, is not about to break the streak). Mainly, I need to think about my route, which today (sadly) will not involve the beach—the northwesterly will be whipping the sand into a frenzy and it will hurtle into my face and eyes, needle and sting, and when I get home I will be dry-eyed and raw-cheeked and will shed sand around the house like a gritty breadcrumb trail.

So, a short walk to the coast and then straight back.

But another sort of preparation is needed—and this is probably quite particular to me. In this sort of weather, I find that I need to prime myself for the sensation of it. Stepping into strong winds is like slipping into the wild Atlantic sea and I am not one of those people who can sprint right into the ocean (am forever jealous of these people; the ladies—and occasional men—running midwinter into churning waves with nothing more than a swimming costume and a grin). No, my body does not do well with sudden sensory surprise. I have to move slowly, breathe deeply, imagine the sensation before it comes so that the shock is not quite so immediate.

So, before I push the front door open and step outside, I imagine it: the feel of a body being bullied by hurtling air, the whooshing of wind against my hood, the heat whisked away from nose, cheeks, ears, toes, the energy needed to stay upright.

We are gushed eastward as we step outside, the wind flapping like a harbour full of sails inside my hood, a weightlessness to my steps, a sense that gravity has submitted to this other force, a force that rivers and whisks and leaves no space for stillness or solidity, but the sensation does not last long—soon, we turn side-on to the wind, and then we are walking into it. Thick. Molasses and syrup. Mud and swamp. I tense my core, my quads, push push push forwards and every now and then, when a gust comes, I stand completely still so that I am less likely to be swept over. Magnus, on four legs, does not have such a problem. If I am a boulder holding steadfast in the rivering wind, he becomes part of the current, all his fur rippling and waving like the fields of long grass on either side of us, at one with the weather in a way my stubborn human body cannot quite manage.

When we get to the junction where we should turn for home, I glance at the sand dunes in the other direction. Beyond them, over the sea, an ink-dark squall is moving in, marching across the ocean, threatening to invade our borders. But it is still a way off, and the sun is reaching its arm down to the sand, and the grass on the dunes is dancing about and yes, it will be painful, the sand will come like blades, but also the wind will be skiing up the slopes of the dunes and sliding over the lip and on the tops I will feel like I am stepping into a waterfall, a vortex, the sky, and also the sun is there, a golden hand, and Magnus is already on his way so what choice do I have? I jog after him to the music of the harbour in my hood and together we run up the sunlit dunes and let the wind buckle us right over the top, and we do it again, again, again despite the blast of sand against our faces; we do it because there is nothing quite like the distillation of sensation: it is shock-cold seawater, it is ice on the tongue, it is waves that break on your back, it is a sauna so hot that the throat feels the fire, it is wind that changes your form for a moment, takes you away on its currents, twists you up inside itself. Magnus goes skippy, chases his own tail, rolls on his back and lets a loud, guttural woof sing up towards the sky and I am grinning, laughing, because sometimes this is really what a body needs, isn’t it—to be pushed outside of itself, or perhaps back into itself—and I would not have known if I had not come, if Magnus did not insist on his twice-daily adventures; no, I’d be sat with my coffee and my notebook, maybe the radio on, maybe the drone of the news, the drone of all those voices who try to sound calm but have a little itch of stress, a little itch of disbelief that oh, yes, there is something else, another awful thing, and another and another and—no, sometimes we just have to give ourselves up to something wild and engulfing, let it dance us into someplace else.

On the way home, the wind shoves at our sides and the two of us walk with a strange half-sideways gait, like a crab who has not quite found her feet. We pass the herring gull whose body has lain in a grassy bank, undisturbed, unscavenged, for weeks. I tended her while she died. Gave her water-soaked kibble and a little bit of meat and hoped she would perk back up, that she was just exhausted after the intense winter storms, but instead she sunk her gorgeous yellow beak to the grass and closed her eyes. And now, after weeks of remaining peculiarly whole, she is finally coming undone: the wind is stripping her soft stomach bare and her downy feathers are flying up, up, up before descending all around like confetti. There is something both awful and joyful about this: a wild funeral, a wild ending.

When I shoulder the front door open, step into the corridor (Magnus running in ahead, flumping his tired body down) the air feels empty, like the world has forgotten how to hold me up, or I have forgotten how to let the world hold me up, and the silence is unsettling, all those sailboats suddenly quiet as if they have been lost to the sea. And in the reliable way of things that distil sensation—whether it is strong wind or cold sea or pounding heat or exercise that narrows everything down to pumping heart and heaving breath—I notice that something in me has shifted, something has come alive, and the day feels different somehow, like anything could happen. I don’t turn on the radio or read the news or begin my work, no, not yet; I just sit in a patch of sunlight on the floor, Magnus sleeping at my feet, and write this, intent on the wonderfully impossible task of trying to bottle a morsel of this windy morning’s peculiar magic.

A quick and messy sketch of Magnus in the wind (his ears really do fly back in a triumph of fluff like this)

The herring gull. She (or he, I’m not sure) was a beauty.

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