They Call the Wind Mariah

December 04

Yesterday the rain let up for perhaps an hour, and I went for a walk. Down Queen Anne Hill there is this tiny park--you only know it’s a park because of the sign posted in front of it; otherwise you might mistake it for a traffic median. It contains a single oak tree and a strip of grass that isn’t even wide enough for a bench. As I walked past it the damp scent of old leaves rose, leeched upward from the ground by a warm familiar wind, a Chinook. These winds are not like other winds; they’re like friends, kindly and full of the earth and blooming with oxygen, and they come down off of the mountains to ease the bouts of cold in the autumn and early winter. I first met them in Colorado, and was more than pleasantly surprised to find they visit the Puget Sound as well. I would know them anywhere; that scent and that warmth are unmistakable. They were immortalized under another name in the otherwise missable musical Paint Your Wagon: “Mariah blows the stars around and sets the clouds a-flyin’/Mariah makes the mountains sound like folks out there were dyin’/Mariah, Mariah, they call the wind Mariah.” (Cute as that is, no one called the wind Mariah before the Kingston Trio wrote the song.) When that scent hit my nose I felt, for the first time since I’ve been back, not home--I define home differently now--but I was reminded of what home is. My relationship with Egypt is a bit like an arranged marriage; I love it because to live there without loving it would be unbearable. There is a particular kind of truth to love that arises from necessity rather than spontaneity or impulse or something French--it’s a truth not often acknowledged in this part of the world, but it is no less real for going unrecognized. It is, however, a tremendous lot of work. It felt good, standing there in the warm and the damp and the dusk, to love something simply because it was familiar and forgiving, and because I wanted to.