The case for Willy-willy

As a matter of interest, the outfit you need to wear if you were to stand against a southwesterly blow like the one of very recent should consist of a swimmer’s cap and scuba diver’s goggles. I’m referring to standing on a dune at North Beach and taking joy out of being able to lean, arms wide open to allow the breeze to support you, at a 70-degree tilt. It’s exhilarating! Almost like being a sea gull in case you ever wanted to get the feel of it. The only exceptin’ here is that gulls don’t have to worry if the wind were suddenly to stop as they have the technology to handle the issue, whereas in my case, a sudden wind-no-more affair generally increases the angle to a 180 on the downward slide of the slope. Incidentally, the cap and goggles tip is to save you hours in the shower trying to scrub millions of minute grains of dune sand out of your hair, ears and nostrils. This bit is based on experience.

The wind, which harvested unsteady trees and made a game out of recycling boxes, blew the topic of names into my thinking. I pondered as I took short breaths of light spray off the whitecaps. Sure, what we call sou’westers back east is expected to bring high energy to shoreline and ship, so brace yourself is the message in the name. But when I looked up more fancier and descriptive names for winds in Canada, it was sparse let me tell you. In fact beiger than beige: low pressure; Arctic; cooling winds; names with no juice to them.

The greatest songwriters in the world are from Canada and for that we don’t have to say sorry: Lightfoot, Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Susan Aglukark. Can you imagine had Stompin Tom, Neil Young, Buffy Sainte Marie or Stan Rogers had a stab at it? Or turning our amazing comedy writers onto it. Who Has Seen the Wind, by the late Saskatchewan born author W.O. Mitchell or Ian and Sylvia’s Four Strong Winds were a start, but still in a global ‘who’s-who’ we are merely spectators in name calling when it comes to wind, rated somewhere between a fart and a bluster.

‘Round the globe are the very memorable names for the seasonal shift of air molecules, winds that affect various regions. There’s Brick Fielder, Samoon (Arabic for poison) Sirocco or Khawseen (word for 50): How about the Mistral of France or Boran, Xlokk (pronounced shlok), Zonda and Moazagoatl. Now those are names! One friend says she was exfoliated by the Meltimi winds on a black lava beach on Santorin Island in Greece, which sounds rude, but yet another talks about losing his false teeth when he opened his mouth in a Willy-willy, which are dust devils in Australia. You see what I mean? How can we give more meaning to air movement?

The best I have come up with so far here in the land of weather small-talk is Chinook or ‘Strong winds knock out power for over 80,000 in Ontario.’ Come on? We who live along the shores of Lake of Shining Waters—Ontario, from the language of the Huron people—gotta be leaders by now in windy name naming.

If the Inuuk can come up with a hundred words for snow, surely we can make an effort to jazz up our nonstop weather monologues. Names like The Blueboxer or There Goes the Neighbours Lawn Furniture or My SOB Umbrella would help spice it up a bit, but I don’t think it would get us to world champion status.

To be honest I don’t even think Newfoundland would have joined Canada if they had known about our windname deficit. Hell, not when they can have a Silver Glitter or a Sheila’s Brush, a Scad, Farmer’s Fertilizer, Misk, Wauzy or Wreckhouse wind; or even a Faffering, Shuff, Meringu, Lambkiller or a Fairy Wind. I would not have held them in contempt if they had opted out of Confederation for a solid case like this, Joey Smallwood or not.

So at this point all I think we need to overcome our handicap is a large blackboard, a few transcribers and a rather large (actually very large) brewhaus so that we may collectively put our heads together. Even get our comedy troupe from Cherry Valley along with Rex Murphy to host it. Its achievable and further, shame no more, no longer shallow folk when it comes to finding poetic descriptive for the winds that pass every day. Just think of it. A Wind Trail of our very own.