It came out of Antarctica like a runaway freight train, its boxcars loaded with angry air animals baring icy fangs, hungry for the taste of anything warm. It brought rain with it; stinging rain that numbed cheeks and hands and then sought out the marrow in the bones of living things.
The Southerlies swept over Porirua Thursday afternoon and on into the night with wind speeds reaching 130-kilometers an hour. The rain did not fall straight down as a result but came at you sideways, almost perfectly horizontal to the ground at times. It was not a fit night for man nor beast to be out and about and yet after-hours life in Porirua went on without taking much notice. The restaurants in town did a good business; the shopping malls were full until closing and people, knowing from long experience that they could not walk upright in the face of a gale-force blow, simply bent into the wind as they walked to their cars or to their homes.
I have known cold winds such as these, but not for a long time. I grew up in New England and upstate New York and, later, in Northeastern Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. Winds that came out of Canada that were cold to begin with became even more so as they blew across the icy fields, rivers and lakes of my youth so my brothers and I simply added another layer or two of clothing and went skating or sledding. The only time the cold wind seemed to bother us in those days was when we were adding those extra layers of clothes so we'd be reasonably warm as we trudged to school in places with names like Ogdensburg and Brocton. In a chorus of whiny voices, we often complained bitterly to my mother that we needed a ride to school because it was so cold outside and the wind was strong enough to steal your breath. My mother, however, never gave our complaints much credence. She had grown up in the Great Depression and her family didn't own a car so she and her sisters walked to school no matter what the weather.
Besides, as she pointed out more than once, the cold and the wind never seemed to stop us from playing hockey... she had a point and she knew it.
So did we and so, grumbling all the way about the unfairness of it all, we walked to school in brass monkey weather and were never the worse for it.
The past few years, however, I have not known winds such as these.
Strong winds, yes.
Even winds that could be called fierce: I rode out Hurricane Andrew in a light pick-up truck with photographer Jim Virga when we worked for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and later, working for The News Journal in Delaware, I went to Louisiana with photographer Carla Varisco and, together, we rode out Hurricane Rita in an SUV.
But while those winds were fearsome they did not carry with them the stinging bite that these Southerlies do. They were big, muscular winds that could knock a man down and tear a tree from its roots, to be sure, but they did not cause your fingers to stop working properly the way these winds from the bottom of the world can.
Kiwis take them in stride.
I, however, am older now and less resistant to the cold so I am inclined to treat them with all the respect due a proper bully who wants my lunch money. In other words, when the Southerlies blow in the future I intend to stay inside with a cup of very hot coffee and listen to the wind sing its siren song.
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