The Wind
And the Caterpillar
Strong wind to young caterpillar — Sorry, Kid It’s nothing personal
A very fine thing about my hometown, or home-village (if you go by size), situated as it is on the very western edge of the country (and continent), with the Pacific Ocean setting out for, and vanishing over the edge of, the farther-west nowhere; yes, a very fine thing about this place is the weather.
Crescent City, California owes its name to the shape of the shoreline, which forms a long crescent, slowly sweeping from west, curving through east, and then back to west beginning north of town and ending well south of it. For that sweeping reason, I assume, we find ourselves in a somewhat miraculous micro-climate pocket, the Pacific serving as a large, impressive air conditioner in the summer (it’s twenty or thirty degrees warmer an hour north, south, or east of here) and like a lap, lap, lapping heater in the winter (I’ve been here going on seven years now, and have yet to see snow on the ground, although there’s plenty of it an hour or so into the mountains to the east. The weather is, in other words, very much tempered by our ocean.
That said, we do get fog (occasionally) and, yes, wind (most days).
A lot of wind. The strong kind. The impersonal kind. The not-very-kind-to-caterpillars kind.
And braving this wind during this morning’s walk I wonder: how did the caterpillar manage to hang on? For it did hang on, while I almost blew over. Actually, I recently wondered the very same thing about a little ant who had ventured up onto the very desk I’m sitting by right now typing this. I don’t want to kill anything, ants included, but nor do I want ants to venture into and get lost in my laptop (somehow), so I blow on it, gently at first, to send it sprawling off the edge (it won’t get hurt if it falls off, at least that’s what Mr. Google tells me). To no effect.
So, I blow a little harder, what to an ant must be a force ten or better, and out of nowhere, too. Still, the little guy sensed it coming before it arrived and found something to grip with (feet I assume, six of them) and something to grip (desk top if nothing else) and went nowhere. Stayed very antishly put.
So, slightly annoyed at this point, I huffed and puffed as only a big bad wolf can and finally dislodged the little fellow; but man, that must have been tornado-like at ground ant. How did he (or she) do it?
I also wonder, off and on, where hummingbirds find shelter in storms, or where birds in general hang out during heavy rain, I never see any around.
And then, more to the point of this wolfku, I assume it to be true that the wind is perfectly impersonal. No-hard-feelings-okay? kind of impersonal. The caterpillar didn’t seem upset with the wind, it just hung on as if put here on this earth for that very purpose — and successfully at that.
I wonder who designed all this. I guess the answer, as Dylan put it, is blowing in the wind.
It’s a marvelous world, though, isn’t it?
© Wolfstuff
