Photo Shoot: Blowin' in the wind
“The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.”
Bob Dylan’s famous 1963 folk ballad wasn’t written about weather forecasting. But the truth is most of the time when it comes to our weather, the wind can answer a lot of questions. Enter the lowly weather vane, invented more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek astronomer Andronicus to determine the direction of the wind.
My history with the “wind vane” doesn’t go back that far, but I do remember it well. My maternal grandfather was a metal worker. He fabricated a trio of flying ducks strung out in a line, balanced over a brass connection to the roof on his garage. The points of the compass were also fashioned out of brass in a Times Roman typeface.
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The ducks were painted black and one of my earliest painting jobs was to help with this task every couple of years. He built three of these, all in the early 1950s. Through inheritance, one now presides atop my garden shed, collecting a layer of wet snow in winter and mostly facing the southwest as the prevailing winds of summer blow through.
Keeping an eye on the winds
I learned early about the compass points and to this day still can usually figure out where north is during my daily travels. As the hazy days of August bear down upon us, I spend a lot of time on my side porch. I should be reading, catching up on correspondence, but on hot afternoons, it is mostly just daydreaming. An art form I fear is falling out of favor as the blue glow of cell phone screens constantly begs for our attention like a 2-year-old.
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I focus my attention on the neighbor’s old brass codfish weather vane. Last Sunday, in the course of about three hours, yes, it was a lazy afternoon, the wind started light from the north, cool and dry. Several hours later as the tide came up. The wind direction had completely switched to the southwest, bringing more humidity and picked up intensity to about 15-20 mph, a classic Cape Cod sea breeze afternoon.
Useless information some would think, but had you started out in Barnstable Harbor in a kayak at noon and were now trying to paddle back against the wind and tide, a bit of wind information would have been quite important. It always is a smart bet to pay attention to Mother Nature and it doesn’t hurt to keep a few Bob Dylan lyrics in mind either.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: Keeping an eye on the winds as August begins
