Similiarities

There's a lot of differences between Dillon Beach on the Northern California coast and Superior in the Sonoran Desert mountains, but yesterday we found something that ties them together. The howling angry spring winds. At the beach, we get the March and April and May (and sometimes February and June, too) gales out of the northwest. Here in the mountains, we get them out of the northeast. Whoo boy! It's April, I guess the wind's going to blow.

At "home" (Dillon Beach) we used to equate the spring winds with the opening days of salmon season, whether it was April 1st or 15th or whenever, the winds could be counted on to scour the beach when the season opened. It doesn't look like there will be much, if any, salmon season this year, but the winds were still blowing the second week in April for the opening of abalone season and they probably will do their duty off and on through May and perhaps in June as well. They usually disappear by the tenth of July, if we're lucky. They make the sand dunes nice and smooth, but the endless days of blowing winds take their toll on one's mental health, it makes your teeth set on edge. They just go on for too many days and get old real quick. So... I was glad, at least, to escape that aspect of spring. I thought.

The weather called for ninety degrees this week-end. Plenty warm, yes, but I figured we'd find something to do in the mornings and late afternoons when it wasn't too hot. Friday night, the wind started howling out of Queen Creek canyon around ten PM. All night long the palm tree outside our bedroom was slashing its fronds in the relentless wind. If you imagine hard enough, you can make the slashing fronds sound like rain at times. Otherwise, if your brain is fully engaged, it sounds like a palm tree getting the bejesus shaken out of it. A few times, there were thumps and bumps against the house. But by ten or eleven Saturday morning, the wind calmed down somewhat. Now, at the beach, the winds calm down (usually) during the night and the dawn is the quietest time, then by mid-morning they get pumping again and really scream by afternoon.

So I found this phenomenon to be pleasantly different. Even if the screaminess of the wind is much the same. Oh yeah... the temperature is different too. Even with the screaming wind, the temps were still around eighty-nine degrees. Kind of like a heater left running wide open, hot air blowing into your face. At the beach, it'd be more like low fifties with a wind chill in the low forties. So yeah, there is a difference.

But then, Saturday night, darned if the wind didn't blow up again. There were even more thumps and bumps all night long and it was still howling in the morning. We found shingles from our roof scattered in the neighbor's yard and one hanging from a tree branch. One of my outside bird cages for the parrots had been blown across the deck and was on end. The palm trees didn't look like they needed to be trimmed any longer. The wind had taken care of that for them. When I walked downtown later in the day, Route 60 was littered with broken shingles from hapless homes. Normally, on a Sunday, there would be a raft of bikers riding up the canyon but the road was pretty quiet yesterday.

Today though, on another walk through a different part of town, we found more damage. A lot of the miner's cottages in this town have these quaint aluminum clad roofs. One such cottage at the foot of our street that faces the eastern Apache Leap had a third of its aluminum sheeting roof skinned right off. Like a big banana peel, it was just skinned back. I gawped at it. The winds had blown in the neighborhood of forty plus mile per hour, but I didn't know they could do this kind of damage!

No, we don't have the kinds of wind damage like tornadoes. And no, we don't have the North Coast howling winds. But yeah.... we're not immune to spring winds, I reckon. I'll just have to stay tuned to see what other "goodies" the weather has in store for us here in Superior.