Wind

July 13, 1998
We live surrounded by an ever-changing ocean of air, its currents both capricious and predictable, its swirls and swells shaping the surface of our planet and the evolution of all that lives on it. To DeBlieu (Meant to Be Wild, 1991), who lives amid the shifting dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, the wind is the breath of divinity. It defines her spirit and her being, just as it has defined the shape of the land and the evolution of the creatures that live on it. It's the protagonist of a story that continues to unfold, and humanity is the antagonist. As DeBlieu makes clear, we have blessed the wind, cursed the wind and struggled to learn its ways. We taunt the wind, mistaking scientific understanding for mastery. As if in vengeance, the wind spreads our poisonous pollution and shifts its global patterns, producing climate changes yet to be revealed. This book's strength is also its weakness. Its story is told not in a focused narrative, but in scattered bits of science, history, personal experience, myth, mysticism and religion. The joy--and frustration--in reading such a book is trying to assemble the pieces in our mind before the next gust disperses them. Its evocative prose deserves praise, but the absence of concrete images diminishes its value to scientifically inclined readers. They will crave diagrams of wind and weather patterns, historical drawings and maps and photographs of people, birds, aircraft and research balloons. But they will find none.