A wind from - where?

In San Diego yesterday, we were fortunate to have the cloud cover. Excessive heat had been forecast for the afternoon, temperatures reaching as high as 100 in our foothills neighborhood, about 13 miles from the coast.

But the clouds kept the heat down. They were created by tropical moisture, called “monsoon” moisture locally, siphoned up from the south by the same features – high pressure centers – that were creating the heat. The clouds even brought a couple of morning showers – most unusual for June – in a couple of places in San Diego County.

At our house, the clouds did nothing more than moderate the heat, with the tradeoff of a slight humid mugginess that is not uncommon in July and August, but yesterday felt strange, and the house felt dark and moody, the way I remember houses feeling in Texas when storms were building.

We had the windows and French doors open, and the little bit of breeze floating through kept us reasonably cool. At about 3, I went from the living room back to the study to check email. The clouds had dissipated some, and hazy sunshine filtered through half-closed shutters. Then something happened. Outside there was a roar, and in the study a feeling of decompression. I looked up and saw everything green outside shaking furiously.

It was a wind, not rising, but bursting: not present one instant, roaring the next, unnatural, without transition. From the other end of the house I heard Karen’s voice, yelling above the roar: “Michael!” I started toward her through the hall between the front and back of the house, which was no longer a conduit of breeze, but a wind tunnel. The living room gives a panoramic view through floor to ceiling windows to the south and west and beyond the shaking foliage I saw in the middle and far distance a strange, dense haze that had not been there minutes before.

We stepped through the west-facing French doors onto the patio. A patio umbrella and several plants in pots were already blown over. There were clouds to the south, and more out over the ocean, but above us it was relatively clear, except for the sudden haze, which I realized was dust, shaken loose from every leaf and surface for miles in every direction.

I couldn’t sense a direction from the wind, or a cause for it. The only winds without cause I had ever seen were all in the movies, and all strange, either biblical or supernatural. In San Diego a few months ago, people experienced a series of strange booms and tremors, like an earthquake, for which a cause has yet to be determined. This wind felt like that.

It persisted for 10 or more minutes; I became busy during that time, holding erect a mature, staked rose tree, whose stake the wind had snapped, until Karen could locate and bring material for repairs. Eventually, by 3:30, the wind had subsided to floating breeze level again. Since that hour, I have periodically checked local weather and media sites; no mention at all in the media, and this morning the National Weather Service site only mentioned a few reports of brief downburst winds, but only in association with showers or thunderstorms.

That may have been our experience, even under a sunny sky that, over us, was only partly cloudy at best. And, yet. I have been in countless winds created by thunderstorms, and this wind did not feel like that. This wind felt like it had been parked in space, waiting until we literally ran into it, which, for some reason, we did, suddenly, and very, very strangely.

The clouds are back today, thankfully, to keep the heat down, maybe even bring a shower. I am certain, though, we won’t again have a wind like yesterday’s; it possesses its own meaning now, like the booms from months ago.