Wind Farm

1200 miles. That's the grand total of the mileage involved in our holiday road trip. Starting on December 20 and ending on January 2, the husband and I wove a giant lopsided spiderweb all over Texas. The bulk of the web, and therefore the likeliest part to catch small insects, was built over the hill country between San Antonio and Austin, but a long filament stretched out to West Texas and then way back south towards what'll serve as home for at least another couple of months.

Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.

Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*

(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)

The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.

And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.

I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)

We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.