An ill wind
The rough geographic area where we live is shaped like a funnel. There’s the Inlet, which is long and thin, and opens to the ocean to the west. Then there are the mountains, to the east, south, and north of the inlet.
The inlet, being water, stays warm a lot longer than the ground inland. (This is also why we’re a lot warmer here than, say, two hundred miles away in Little City. We get -30F in January and February; they get -60F. God bless the water, I say!) The mountains, being high, are colder and covered with snow much earlier than lower elevations; there are also glaciers.
The topography ends up with some interesting–and massive–differences in temperature between the inlet and inland, which can stir up winds. The funnel shape can take winds off the ocean or down from the mountains and intensify them; think of how a stream is slow and gentle when moving across a wide area, but becomes rapid and forceful when squeezed between narrower banks.
So we regularly have “high wind warnings” at “higher elevations” along the inlet. The higher elevations can get 85 mph winds and the lowlands 50 to 60 mph winds. We here at Chez OmegaMom are lucky in that we’re in a small depression, a cup in some rolling hills, so we rarely get the truly high winds.
Last night, the wind started whipping up early in the evening, and by the time we went to bed the trees, hidden in the darkness, were thrashing and tossing about. Sometime in the night the power went out. The wind was still blowing when we woke up in the morning, and it had completely stripped all the remaining golden and brown dead leaves off the trees in the intervening hours. The extent of the damage in our area was extensive twig litter on the lawn, a piece of plywood flung from its original resting spot, and some errant tarps blown against trees here and there in the neighborhood.
But in Big City, this was a Big Wind, of up to (or higher than) 100 mph. Trees were uprooted and flung against houses. Power lines were pulled down. People’s fences were gone. Roofs were ripped off, lawn equipment migrated down the roads, and boats were tossed upside down.
I mentally moan and groan about being in the characterless suburbs where we are, and wish to be closet to Small Town Alaska, closer to the inlet and the mountains, but I must admit that I’m glad we don’t get subjected to the ferocious winds that other areas around here get. I’ll take our 40 to 50 mph gusts and be glad we are spared the higher intensity stuff.
