Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

This Sounds Like Home

This Sounds Like Home

I forget why I jotted this note down precisely.

Most of the time an annotated passage takes me straight back to my thoughts when originally reading it…

But I’m blank.

Outside of the mountains, this scene does not sound different than it is in Lubbock.

On a dry year the baked cotton fields begin to blow as the summer wears on.

The dry morning air turns into feeling like a hair dryer as the wind picks up and the afternoon heat begins.

By dinnertime there is a sand storm and half of West Texas is in the air and on the move.

From my desert plateau, I could see our house, just beyond the city limits, at the base of the Cerbat Mountains, amid red-rock desert speckled with mesquite, tumbleweeds, and paddle-shaped cacti. Out here, dust devils swirled up from nothing, blurring your vision, then disappeared. Spaces stretched on, then fell away into the distance.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

It sounds like Saudi Arabia too though.

It sounds like home.

Foehn Wind

Foehn Wind

So, a foehn wind, as it turns out, is the warm and dry wind coming off the leeward side of a mountain.

(Windward, into the wind. Leeward, with the wind.)

So, for example, cool and wet air hits the front of a mountain range. Clouds form and rain out most of the air’s moisture as the air get higher and higher. Then warm and dry air falls back down the other side of the mountain.

Many of the islands of Hawaii are good examples of this: Half the island looks like a rain forest, the other half looks like a desert.

Good-grief, my allergies?

I’ll take the warm and dry side of the mountain.

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Sterling Terrell