People who know mountain winds understand. It always takes less of a blow than you think to make movement a challenge. With the winds at 40 mph, it is hard to make headway into them. At 50 mph and more, gusts land like punches. At 60 and above, it's easy to get knocked down.
People unfamiliar tend always to underestimate the power of the wind, particularly that of a wind heavy with rain or snow. Moisture makes the air denser, and thus it packs more of a punch. But even in the mildest of circumstance, there is a tendency to undervalue the force of that invisible thing we call air, and thus inflate the speed at which it is moving to try to explain its power.
A 10 mph wind almost invariably becomes a 20, a 20 a 40, and a 50, well, that takes us into the land where many declare "the winds must have been blowing 100 mph."
If you're ever in 100 mph winds or anything close to it, you'll know. You'll be crawling.
On the more than 200-year-old Beaufort Wind Scale, Force 12 winds -- those above 75 mph -- are rated capable of taking apart poorly constructed buildings. Force 10 winds -- 55 to 63 mph sustained -- mark the point at which trees start to get uprooted. And Force 7 winds -- a mere 32 to 38 mph -- are where it gets "very hard to walk."
It's nice to believe that if you're a manly man you can battle through extreme winds, but you can't. The wind doesn't care about gender, age or physical fitness. Yes, if you're stronger, you can endure more, but there are always limits.
As now-retired rescue ranger Daryl Miller from Denali National Park once observed, "you don't rescue people in storms."
It doesn't matter how strong or fit or experienced you are. You don't because you can't. Attempts at rescue in extreme conditions only put rescuers at risk. Even in this day and age with all our sophisticated technology, the forces of nature are not to be taken lightly.
Listening to the winds rumble over the roof while watching the digital display on the anemometer bouncing up around 85 mph one evening last week, it was impossible to avoid thinking about this occasionally in the lull between two related and dominate thoughts:
1) I'm glad I'm not riding this out in a tent tonight.
2) I'm glad I'm not at sea in a boat.
If you've seen significant winds from either perspective, you develop a deep appreciation for how comfortable our day-to-day, city life is, even when nature tries to make life uncomfortable, even when the power flickers and -- God forbid -- the TV and internet go out, leaving you with nothing to do but listen to the banshee screaming outside.
Anchorage Hillside homes get noisy when it starts gusting to 100. You hear the big blasts coming long before they arrive. The 768-mph speed of sound moves out ahead carrying the noise of 100 mph winds ripping at the earth.
You hear this coming, and then you feel it. The biggest gusts can make even the best built homes shake as if hit by an earthquake.
Some Hillside neighbors confess they can't sleep when it gets like this, but the tumult in any house pales in comparison to the roar of the wind, the shriek of the rigging, the groans of the hull and the banging of water against everything aboard a sailboat at sea in these conditions, or the flapping and snapping of nylon in the wind in the mountains that overshadows the pounding of a heart audibly loud as you wonder if a tent will survive, and you with it.
At times like those, you begin to grasp the fragility of life that we so take for granted every day.
I confess to a certain appreciation for the natural reminders of this wherever and whenever they come, especially now.
It is incredibly easy these days to get preoccupied with the troubled state of the American economy. If you're not worried, you simply haven't been paying attention, or you're so young and uninvested you have little or nothing to lose. For the rest of us, it is undeniably troubling to see investments and retirement funds shrink to half.
A good storm helps jerk you back to reality. It reminds you of just how well off we are, and just how well off we will remain even -- if appears to be the case -- this period of economic retrenchment is long and difficult.
Yeah, we might all have to make do with a little less, but our version of less doesn't begin to compare with the best of what life was only a few hundred years back in Alaska history. Let alone the struggles of survival, say, 1,000 years ago.
Having lived for weeks at times in a tent, I can still only barely imagine what it was like to live an entire life in temporary structures dependent solely on tiny fires for warmth. Having gone hungry for days, I cannot comprehend what it was like to go hungry for weeks hoping game might wander by or that you might survive until the salmon return.
That was life in the natural world. Now, we live most of our lives in the man-made world where we think life is tough because the wind is blowing so hard we have to keep the kids home from school, or it becomes difficult to walk the dog, or the numbers written down on paper to chart our investments get smaller.
Just think, for most of human existence, people would have been overjoyed to have had it this bad.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
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