In Auckland, the neighbours gather to complain about the wind. For weeks it has tormented us, howling over the rooftops, rattling the windows, sending the dogs prowling uneasily around the sections.
My 92-year-old father, staunch swimming member of the Kohimarama High Tide Club, reports via WhatsApp, “Nearly got to the striped buoy today, but was beaten back by the wind.”
At Karekare, the gale screams over the hilltops, but down in a hollow beyond the Pōhutukawa Glade, there is calm. The surf is wild, the water turquoise, crossed with foamy currents. Above the dune, a sandstorm twists into the air, seethes and glitters across the beach and explodes into particles over the sea.
The wind follows you. In the Far North, the woman at the store consults her wind app. “My house has been shaking all day, but tomorrow will be worse. The squalls will reach 47km/h!” The dog walks to the top of the section, sits in the grass and listens to the air over the Karikari Peninsula. The wind lifts his ears until they float, horizontal, at the sides of his head.
The wind brings memory of the wind. Item: in Menton, my daughter-in-law, in a Zoom work meeting, makes urgent hand signals beyond the laptop, “Shut the door!” My son has opened the ranch-slider, letting in the wind, and the team has watched, on the screen, her hair blow up until it stands out crazily around her head. Item: on the last day I see my brother alive, the wind blows open the door. Notes and papers and old photos whirl around us, and I say, “Oh, leave it open.”
The wind brings catastrophe. At the beginning of 2025, my daughter-in-law watches from London as her home city burns. The Santa Ana winds, risen to hurricane force, have unleashed the firestorm destroying whole Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Her mother calls: she and her other daughter, who is ill, are stuck in their LA house. It’s on the edge of the evacuation zone; should they stay or try to go? They make the decision to leave, to shelter with friends in Arizona.
American medical care: if the illness doesn’t kill you, the invoice might finish you off.
We can’t stop thinking of them, two women, one unwell, preparing to find a way out of the hellscape, on to the lawless freeway, to drive through the night. But an update arrives: the daughter has collapsed. Her mother has managed, miraculously, to summon an ambulance and they are ferried to a hospital.
They will be safe from the flames, but other horrors lurk. Their house may yet burn down. The air is polluted, the water is poisoned and they’re trapped in the merciless healthcare system. American medical care: if the illness doesn’t kill you, the invoice might finish you off.
The wind of change is blowing. The President-elect pitches in with his populist’s notion of leadership. Blaming the Governor of California, Donald Trump writes Gavin Newsom’s name as “Newscum”. Classy, and so helpful, it’s just the tone the suffering people need.
The wind takes our nerves to the edge. Joan Didion wrote about LA’s Santa Ana winds, how they “dry the hills and the nerves to flash point”. They are “persistent and malevolent”, like the Mistral of France and the Mediterranean Sirocco. They cause headaches and nausea, nervousness and depression. The Santa Ana, with its “incendiary dryness, invariably means fire”. The city burning, Didion wrote, “is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself”. The winds “show us how close to the edge we are”.
Climate change is in the wind. Temperatures are higher, weather events more extreme. Close to the edge, we see the future in our dreams: our own personalised, technicolour Hollywood ending.
