WHAT LOVES the wind in this spare land? Of the trees it is the aspens, their leaves long-stemmed so they flutter in the slightest breeze. If you were led blindfolded to a grove of them, you’d step back, sure you stood on the brink of Niagara. The mist the wind sprays is gritty on your cheeks, but it doesn’t dull these leaves. Wind flips them and wins the toss; it frisks them from stem to tip and shakes them insensible. When they soar, then fall, the leaves forget they cannot rise again.
Of the unwanted, it is the tumbleweeds, cursèd, straw-coloured candelabras of brittle stems and thorns. Shallowly rooted, they leave their rainless gardens of neglect and somersault like ribs of acrobats across the fallow fields. At lines of barbed wire stretching from post to post, with the surety of stone, they build a border, a wailing wall, the wind hauling sifts of clay and packing them in, so the wind itself cannot pass through.
Of the grasses, it is the wheat. At dusk, the golden heads ripe with seeds nod and dream they are that ancient glacial ocean, swelling and breaking, moon-pulled: you feel an undertow at the edges of the fields and want to go under. Seagulls drift above you, forever it seems, as if they’d been sent from the ark, and they’re riding hunger and belief on currents of air. It’s easy to imagine you could push off in a boat, wind at your back, going home by a sea that tosses and heaves, without a light to guide you.
Of the animals, it is the badger and the wolverine. They have met their match. They bare their teeth and the wind does not weaken or retreat. They dig in the earth and the wind dives in ahead of them. They bite and won’t let go, but the wind can hang on longer. They know wind is the better hunter though they’ve never seen what it catches, what makes it thrive.
Of the human, it is a woman, though most of her kind hate it, will tell you how it drives them crazy on the farms. This one walks right into it, head lowered, thighs and calves working hard as if she’s climbing, pushing the boulder of the wind with her shoulders and chest. There’s an energy that gusts inside her; wind steals her soul, adds distance and desire, then gives it back. One woman bent into it, a flat country’s Sisyphus, the wind rising. What lungs are capable of punching out such an exhalation, inexhaustible and lowly, blowing farther than any prairie eye can see?