I turned onto the ridge road out of the timber last June feeling pretty good about myself, and about forty yards later I had my hat in my hand and my head down. The wind had been there the whole time. I just could not feel any of it walking the low lane with a tree line on the west side, and the second I came out of that shelter it hit me broadside and stayed on me for the next two miles.
Of all the weather out here, wind is the one I still misjudge most often. Rain I dress for. Cold I dress for. Wind I look at on the porch, decide it is nothing, and then get educated by it about twice a year.
Open ground has nothing in it to slow the air down
That is the whole problem in one sentence. A wind that feels like a nice breeze in a yard with a house and two maples in it is an entirely different force out in the middle of four hundred acres of young corn. There is nothing between you and the county line. It does not gust and settle the way it does around buildings, it just leans on you, steady, for as long as you are out there.
What that does over a couple of miles is not dramatic, it is cumulative. You are working harder for the same pace, you are bracing with your neck and shoulders without noticing, and you get back to the truck tireder than the distance says you should be. The first several times that happened I blamed my legs. It was not my legs.
The out and back mistake
Here is the trap I fall into. I start out with the wind behind me. It feels wonderful. I am moving well, the miles are cheap, and I go farther than I planned because everything feels easy. Then I turn around.
A tailwind lies to you about your fitness and a headwind tells you the truth. I have made that mistake enough times now that I have a rule about it. On a windy day I walk out into the wind first, while I am fresh, and take the push home. It makes the front half of the walk feel like work and the back half feel like a reward, which is backwards from what I want emotionally and exactly right for what my legs want. If a route only works the other direction, I cut the distance short of where I think I can go, and I have never once regretted that.
What wind does to cold, and to heat
In winter the effect is obvious and everybody knows it. Twenty degrees and still is pleasant walking. Twenty degrees with a hard wind across a cut field will get through anything that is not actually wind resistant, and it goes for the same three places every time, which are ears, wrists, and the gap where your shirt has come untucked. I carry a thin wind layer for nine months of the year and it earns its keep more than any other thing in the truck.
In summer people forget wind cuts the other way, and it is a real gift. Ninety degrees with a steady breeze on an open road is far more tolerable than eighty five and dead still down in the bottom timber where the air does not move at all. Wind also keeps the gnats off, and any June evening walker will tell you what that is worth. Some of the best hot weather walks I have had were on days I would have called too windy in April.
Where the shelter actually is
Once you start noticing wind you start noticing that the countryside is full of small shelter, and you can build a route out of it. A hedgerow does not have to be much to knock the edge off. A cut bank on the low side of a road works. So does the lee of a barn, a round bale line, a terrace, standing corn, even a good fencerow that has grown up thick.
The thing to know is that the calm behind a windbreak reaches out several times the height of whatever is making it, so a row of trees along a fence line covers a lot more road than you would guess just looking at it. On a rough day I will string those together and take a longer, uglier route with shelter over a shorter, prettier one across open ground. The distance costs less than the wind does.
The afternoon on the ridge that I should have cut short
Back to that day in June. I had five miles planned and no reason to be stubborn about it, and I was stubborn about it. The wind was quartering into me for the whole middle section, hard enough that I was walking with my head turned to keep the grit out of my eyes. There had been a field disked upwind a day or two before, and I was getting a steady issue of it.
I finished, and I did not enjoy a single mile of the back half. Worse, I did not see anything, because I spent the entire time looking at the ground three feet in front of my boots. The whole point of getting out on these roads is looking around, and wind had quietly taken that away from me while I congratulated myself on not quitting. There was a perfectly good timber loop half a mile back that I walked right past. Now when the wind takes my head down, I count that as the signal to change routes instead of a thing to tough out.
Wind days I actually look forward to
A good drying wind after a wet stretch is the best news a walker gets around here. Two days of sun and wind will bring a soft road back further than four days of sun alone. When we get a wet week followed by a windy one, I will go straight out to check the roads that usually stay closed longest, because that is when they open up.
I like a wind in the fall too, for reasons that have nothing to do with footing. Everything moves. The corn talks, the timber roars up on the ridge and goes quiet in the bottom, hawks hang up over the open ground and hardly beat a wing. On a still day the countryside sits there. On a windy one it is doing something. I just want to be dressed for it and pointed in the right direction when it starts.