I live in Illinois, and it is as your mind imagines, vast wide open farmland, pocked with small towns, huddled around grain silos. The fields are empty this time of year, wet with ran, corn stubbled plains as far as the eye can see.
With this particularly geography there isn’t the natural landscape necessary to stop the wind. It comes screaming out of Iowa and Kansas, freed from the restraints of the far off Rockies. Nothing stops it. Trees are long gone, sacrifice to the corn gods, mountains are a distant dream. The wind runs wild, unrestrained, unopposed.
Its getting warmer, warm enough to bike, but you don’t dare. So you take what you’re given, running. I ran last night. The wind was from the South West, kissed with a breath of Spring. Still cool, but hopeful. I ran out against it, 25 mph, three miles out. Leaning hard, head up, shoulders forward. I’m sure my profile looked as if I was ready to plow the near by fields. Three miles out, it could have been a hundred. I feel myself slow, suddenly I’m walking, unconscious to it. I wake up, start running, but its not really running. The road stretches out before me, distorted by my mind. Dante’s third bolgia, seventh circle, eternal suffering.
Then I turn around, wind to my back. The road is alive under my feet, I am a god, Hermes dreams of speed like this. The cloud soaked skies opens, rays of light shine before me, life is perfect. The wind gust to 30 mph, and what I’m doing can not be called running, it has evolved. Punctuated equilibrium, push the envelope, watch it bend.
Before time and space explode under the strain, its over, and I’m mortal again or always was.
Either way, its windy again today.