Prairie Wind
Saturday, May 3, 2008
The other day, we had quite a wind here in the Chicago area. Enough so that it brought me back to the following incident while I was in High School:
As I left the house to go out and feed the cattle, the western half of the sky looked dark sandy brown. And there is a lot of sky. In the barnyard, the cattle were a skittish, as if they knew of something impending.
On this Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the temperature was below freezing and there was about two inches of ice on the reservoir, the wind calm. After I fed the cows, I headed back to the house. I saw that the lights were off. Nobody knew why. Fortunately, we had a gas stove, so dinner was not a problem. The furnaces were gas, with the fan run by electricity. Even though this was not cold by Montana standards, it could get chilly in the house if the electricity was off for long.
After dinner, the west wind picked up, and then began to howl. Wind in that part of prarie is from the west, unless it comes from the north. From the north, it has little to slow it down between here and the Yukon.
As the evening wore on, the temperature rose, climbing to 60.
This was the irrigated place a mile north of town, and it was a smaller house. So Dad added a trailer house connected to the back door of the house for three of us kids to sleep in. When it came time for bed, the wind was loud enough to impede all conversation.
The trailer and the connector and the house formed a U-shaped space facing west. The connector was on a concrete carport. From somewhere, a coffee can was trapped in that U, and was picked up by the wind and slammed repeatedly against the edge of the carport. All night long. The sides of the trailer house seemed to be moving in and out half a foot as the gusts rose and fell.
Somehow, we slept.
In the morning we awoke to still no electricity and to find the snow completely gone, the ground dry, and the ice on the reservoir completely melted. One of the 2300 bushel metal grain bins was missing without a trace. The base was about 12 feet in diameter.
We walked to the end of the quarter-mile of driveway to wait for the bus for school, not wearing winter clothing.
After school, we walked down the driveway to see the orange Minneapolis Moline tractor pulling a mess of metal with a chain. It was the grain bin, now no more than two feet high. It had been east across the highway, a quarter mile downwind, lying in the field. To get there, it had to have jumped over an old unused brooder house about twenty feet from the base of where the grain bin had been. Not a mark on the brooder house.
On the east side of the brooder house lay one of our cats, no evident injury.
They said that the anemometer in town broke off its moorings after reading 106. We heard that there were 150 power poles down between us and the end of the powerline. The power finally came back on on Sunday.
Living these days in the Windy City, in recent years we have heard stories of big wind back home, one that tipped railroad cars over. So I have often wondered if those who love nature include the more extreme aspects of Montana.