The sea calls my name

Wind from the ancient sea

A hurricane-force wind blew down the pine onto my roof on a February day. The house shook and I looked out the front window to see the pine cantilevered from the ground to the roof. Damn it’s Super Bowl Sunday and I have a game to watch but that’s how it is in Wyoming where there are plenty of mighty winds but no hurricanes. Like in “Oklahoma” where “the wind comes sweepin’ ‘cross the plains,” in Wyoming, the wind comes sweeping across the Gangplank of the Laramie Range right through Cheyenne and on to Nebraska. Wind from an ancient sea, nothing to stop it but my tree and my roof and a limited imagination.

We slept with bedroom windows wide in the middle of winter. Furnace so efficient we cranked it down but were still warm as toast in our beds. I came to bed late, Chris already sleeping, and the wind would ruffle the dainty curtains etched with palm trees. The wind lulled me to sleep. Trees might come crashing down or maybe just big branches but this was Wyoming and trees were scarce and far between. As I fell asleep, I imagined the wind with a salt tinge, fresh from the ocean, traveling the thousand yards from the beach to our little house and through the wide-open jalousie windows and the beat-up screens and into my memory where it remains.

And last night, I heard the ocean while reading in my house a short walk away from the Atlantic. It’s wide, the ocean, wider than Wyoming and the entire West with its gangplanks and sweeping plains and rock-ribbed cliffs. I threw open the window and realized the ocean was kicking, stirred up by some force beyond the horizon. It was loud, as if waves were breaking at my tympani. I rushed to bed, tucked myself in, memories of the surf kicking up and into my teen-age room, promise of big waves tomorrow, surfing with my brother, gone these ten years, the sea calling us as if it knew our names.