Playing Fair and Being Kind

3-26-14

The past 12 hours have been made of the stuff I dream of. I don’t run from much but the wind in Palm Canyon last night was a bit much. I had a terrific dinner at Krazy Coyote Bar and Grill in Borrego Springs. I spent 2 hours eating a steak and sipping iced tea in a huge room filled with other gray haired people. (It seems all the places I visit to address as possible resting spots are filled with like-aged humans.) After the apple cobbler and coffee I lurched out of the place and found the sun was gone behind the mountains between Palm Canyon and Julian. I had about a half mile to walk back to the tent. While treading the obscure trail through cholla, creosote, and smoke trees and being especially careful not to find the rattlesnake I’ve been praying for the past week I noticed the wind was fresher than earlier in the afternoon. It was coming directly over that mountain previously spoken of.

Note: I’m listening to LeAnn Rimes sing “Blue”. I’d marry her in a heart beat if she’d just sing that all day. “Blue, oh, so lonesome for you…”

By the time I got back to Site 70 (my address up to last night) the wind had moderated. I pulled extra blankets out of the SAAB to augment the padding I’d used the night before which had proven inadequate. The bed seemed perfect for a good 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Out went the lantern; off came the clothes (I know, I know), and into the sack I crawled. The tent was flapping a bit with the wind and I thought how comforting to feel the side of the structure push against me a bit.

I fell asleep; it was around 8:15 P.M. The wind continued to build and I was awakened at 10:30 by the tent pushing me without apology. Wind and noise; I peeked out the screen window by my head and saw the stars were bright pretty much all around. While I was doing this the side of the tent facing the west where the mountain separated this canyon from Julian, Warner Springs, and the Pacific Ocean began an insistent slapping, heaving, and shoving action that made me think my sleep was over. I lay back down and listened to the wind rough up the tent, and me by extension. After about 5 minutes of being insulted I decided to make an executive decision. I wasn’t going to get any sleep this way and I had stacked a bunch of my possessions on the table under the sun shelter. I could just imagine the scattered mess I’d be chasing if the wind got a purchase on that pile of stuff. That was it; the wind beating up on me and possibly catching a grip on the prizes on the picnic table wiped the sleep away and I lurched into action. 

“Lurched” is the perfect description of how I move from a reclining effect to something other than that. I put on my clothing, found the shoes with no scorpions inside, and, with shoes on, limbo-ed out of the tent and into the turbulence. It was worse outside than inside the tent. With lantern in hand I went to the sun shelter to find all was amazingly intact on the table. My hat was being pushed around on my head and the air was chilly. While I was in the SAAB I turned on the key to check the temperature of the air. 66 F. I found my windbreaker and the latent heat from the day still in the material felt wonderful when I slipped it on.

It took me about a twenty minutes to pull stakes and throw all of the stuff that was on the table plus the tent and the bedding and the camp chairs into the car. I counted the stakes and the tent poles; 8 tents stakes and 17 poles plus two connectors. All the time the wind was holding strong and I needed to use a half dozen rocks I’d gathered earlier to anchor the flappy stuff until I could condense their size and shape and throw all into the back of the SAAB.

I felt that this was my only solution to not being able to use the tent site as intended. I thought I’d get on the road and head for the Inland Valley. At least get out of the desert wind and someplace I could relax. My intended route was S22, S2, Rt. 79. I wish I could have done this ride in the daylight. As I drove the S22 up the mountain I recalled coming the opposite direction in 1977 on a motorcycle with the “Easy Does It Riders”. The ride is amazingly beautiful; the vistas over the open desert stunning. Right now though I was crawling the mountain in very windy conditions and, I noticed, dropping temperatures. The air outside the car dropped to a low of 46 F during the ascent; down from about 66 F. 

That was my night. Here I should introduce Gluskabe. The Abenaki of Northern New England and Canada have a character who falls in between the Great Spirit and the humans. He is a being who adjusts the conditions of life to improve the futures of the people. Sometimes he over corrects and needs to adjust things as he goes along. His adventures make for wonderful stories that help pass time and to inform and educate. During the windy encounter I had in Palm Canyon I was reminded the encounter Gluskabe had with the Wind Eagle.

Gluskabe was involved with a project but the wind was fresh and blowing a bit harder than what our man liked. Gluskabe decided he would go to the top of the mountain where the Wind Eagle lived and capture him and prevent the large bird from flapping his wings so hard. On the way up the mountain, and the closer Gluskabe approached, the wind became stronger, so strong that it blew his clothes off  and finally so strong that it blew Gluskabek’s hair right off of his head. By the time he reached the Wind Eagle he was totally convinced something had to be done to prevent this condition from continuing. Gluskabe wrestled the Wind Eagle down and grasped him, tied his wings tightly to the Wind Eagle’s body and shoved him into a crevice between the boulders on top of the mountain. The wind stopped and all was still and peaceful.

Gluskabe returned to his home (where Gluskabe also had a grandmother living nearby in the form of some helpful mammal such as a beaver or muskrat other benign creature). Gluskabe was able to continue on his project successfully for the rest of the time he needed but during this time the wind had not blown at all and there was a new situation that was unfavorable for all. With the air still the atmosphere grew stuffy and stale and smelly and putrid. No air moved at all and the people began to suffer. Smells built upon smells and soon people grew sick. Grandmother told Gluskabe he needed to release the Wind Eagle in order to move the air to clean all of the lands of the putrid and gross air.

Gluskabe returned to the mountain and found the Wind Eagle where he had stuffed him into the crevice between the boulders. Gluskabe pulled the Wind Eagle out and untied one of his wings and placed the Wind Eagle back on the top of the mountain. The Wind Eagle flapped the one free wing and the air moved but not as violently as before. Gluskabe returned to his home and the wind blew in such a way that the air was moving and purifying the homes of the people in such a way that it was never again necessary to climb the mountain to capture the Wind Eagle. However, when Gluskabe returned home he found the people were lying around on the ground with maple syrup dripping from their mouths and they had become very fat from eating so much maple syrup. He had to do something but that is a tale for another time.