You have never contended with real wind unless you have lived in Steinbach, Manitoba. There is wind here, in my village and in your windy city, but this wind is but a gentle breeze compared with the wind that howls through this town in southern Manitoba that was named for a stony brook that long ago ran dry. Lake Geneva wind is varied. If it blows on a Tuesday it is exhausted by breakfast on Wednesday. Our wind has no stamina. The wind in Steinbach is always in action, blowing from the north or blowing from the south. Bringing with it an arctic blast from Saskatchewan or a thunderstorm from the plains of South Dakota. Wind blows from the West and heads to the East uninterrupted by any hill or stream or slight valley. The blowing never stops. It is, as you can imagine, annoying.
Wind leaves nothing undisturbed. If you have arranged an outside lunch, or dinner, and your table is set just so, wind isn’t impressed. Wind will blow your table cloth up at the edges, it will knock over your wine glass, and it will push just hard enough to knock your cut flower arrangement onto its side, spilling water onto your lap. Wait for a mighty wind and then go play catch in the yard with a football, or a Frisbee. You’ll find that this isn’t fun either, not in the least. There are television shows on fishing and magazines on fishing that advise the fisher to find a windy point, and fight for position against the wind while fishing. They say this is where the fish will be. Me? I’ll be on the other side of that point, in the calm water, content to catch nothing as long as I don’t have to be subjected to the wind.
I have done much fly fishing over the past year, and I plan to do much more of it during this coming one. The problem with fly fishing is wind, well, wind and people walking behind you. If I could roam a beach or wade a flat, and do both of these things in the dead still of a windless day, I would appear capable. I would coax my fly further and further with each false cast, double hauling to push it further on the back cast and then much further on the release. In the wind I can barely keep the fly from hitting me in the head or hooking me in the shoulder. This is what the wind does. It also helps me sail, but that is typically the beginning and the end on my thin list of pros.
And so it is strange to be me today, to be cheering on the wind. The air temperature is eight degrees, the wind is howling from the north. If I were fishing on a day like today, I would curse the wind and hide around the Western tip of Conference Point, or to either side of Pebble Point. Wherever I would fish, I would find my way out of the wind and into the lee. But today I am not fishing. Not with a fly and not with a lure, I am not fishing at all. And I am not golfing, or throwing a football, and I am not setting up a picnic lunch. I am inside, with the furnace burning the bluest flame, and I can see the wind outside my office window but I cannot feel it. The wind today is not a foe, but it is a friend. It is the 1980s, I am the US, the wind is the Taliban, and the ice is the Soviet enemy.
All I want the wind to do today is blow. I want it to blow so hard and for so long that no one dare walk their dog on the street. I want it to blow so hard and so long that no dog asks for that walk. The wind today is a tenuous friend working hard and long to blow a heavy chop on the lake. This chop will keep the ice at bay, or at least in the bays, and no matter the temperature outside, the wind can keep our lake ice free. I shouldn’t be like this. I should welcome the ice. I should enjoy the cleansing that it provides to Geneva Lake. Yesterday, Geneva Bay had considerable ice cover. It was fresh ice. It was beautiful, sort of. But it was suffocating at the same time. I saw despair when I looked at that icy cloak. I saw a delayed spring, and with it delayed boating and fishing and cruising.
I have sympathy for my ice boating friends. For the ice fishers too. But this isn’t about you, it’s about me. And today, I love the wind only because I hate the ice.