Weather Diary - Day 4 (Thursday March 23 2006 Sunny and Cool 54F)

On the Wind

I am up at 5, awake due to the departing (invisible) diesel truck. It will be another two hours before Chester rouses himself, so I, instead of going back to sleep, embark on my early morning routine:

• Make cup of tea. (In the microwave. The gas stove scares me, so I ignore it, not wanting to burn down the cottage.)
• Gaze out onto the dark empty road. (No lights, no one.)
• Take cup of tea back to bed.
• Read.

I decide to use this time in a monastic way, (as in  monk-like study), and so begins my regime of spiritual reading.
It is a comfort, this routine - book, bedside lamp, steaming cup of tea, snoring dog. And a challenge, as I hear a series of unsettling gusts of wind in the slowly lightening wide world.
The wind.
In Ocracoke, trees don't grow to a great height, being buffeted around by whatever blows in off the Atlantic. This a.m., these stunted trees sound as if they are being bent double.

Spiritual reading is one step in the process for me, the process of art-making. I am hoping that some morsel of this reading will stick in me, and so influence my drawings. A tall order perhaps, but everything here seems to have an effect. Ideas seem to flow out of me in a natural and organic way, and everything that I feel seems as crystal, sharply defined. After a couple of hours, I climb out of my book. It is a day for a long leg-stretch - fresh, windy. The wide open Atlantic is beckoning to Chester (now stirring) and me. The art will wait. I am in need of colour.
It is a less than ten minute drive to the stretch of beach which calls us. Having parked, we walk along the sandy boardwalk, climbing up and away toward the shore, a definite chill in the air, but a manageable wind. It is only when we are over the dunes, the second after the sea comes into view, that it hits us. Like a slap, the wind pushes us back. I gather myself and try again, finding that by walking south, we are at least partly sheltered. (Chester, surprisingly, seems unbothered by the wind.)
The sand, normally a smooth and undulating blanket, is now pock-marked with a hard shell-like crust, and stings my bare legs as tiny pellets travel at breakneck speed across the expanse of beach.
But, the sea - I can't drag my eyes from it. A chaotic churning caldron, it has nothing in common with the rhythmic order of yesterday. I have no desire to be within twenty yards of it for fear of being grabbed and hauled into its depths.

This is a short walk.

But, mission accomplished. I do my best to etch the (ever-changing) hues in my mind, and although they are interpreted, muted, softened, in the hour before I actually begin my drawing and get them down, the flitting colours, the feel of the wind, the spirit of it all, is there.