Wind

When lightning hits water, the electricity spreads outward across the surface. The mast of our boat was a problem much the way a lone tree is: with its tendrils of positive charge, it called to the polarized clouds, literally reaching for them.

The forecast was wrong, of course. The rain that might've come that afternoon (60 percent) came in the morning (0 percent), five hours ahead of schedule. My parents and I were a mile from shore when the air changed: the wind died, and from our boat until halfway to the horizon, Lake Michigan turned glassy; beyond, waves like corduroy lined the water in consistent and constant rows. The stillness around us was soft in light too dark for ten in the morning. We panicked.

This was before weather apps, when people still used BlackBerrys, before hyperlocal forecasts with numbers that are still wrong, apps that say, no rain anywhere in the area, despite windshield wipers wiping and raised umbrellas puffing inside out—despite the precipitation exactly in the area. When this happens I'm not frustrated but hopeful: the weather just needs to catch up with the app, the reality with its measurements. Never mind that a forecast is a measure of the future, not the present.

Still, I have a deep affection for weather forecasts. On my phone every morning, standing in front of my desk, towel wrapped around my wet hair, I check two apps, then three sites on the computer, computing by intuition some inexact average that helps answer, among other things, which shoes to wear and how many pairs of socks. I need weather—its numbers, its icons—for decision-making, and I need decision-making for movement, for not being stuck in a bathrobe, staring into a closet of unquantified possibility, or in front of the mirror, trading one cardigan for another, unable to decide which one looks best and if it looks good enough to trump temperature concerns.

There is knowing the weather for social reasons too, so I have something to say when I step into an elevator and lock eyes with someone I sort of know. We face the front, arms at our sides, and in winter we tell each other we're cold and in summer we say we're hot and in between we find something distinctive about the day—the humidity, the wind—to complain about.

________

If you sail too close to the wind, the sail flickers back and forth and the boat doesn't just stop but moves in reverse. Sail too far from the wind, and the sail again luffs, sometimes swinging the boom all the way around, the sound of the thwapping canvas like punches. But sail just close enough and the sail grows taut, the centerboard hums through the water, and the boat glides miraculously forward.

The wind that morning was from the west, from behind the city's long-toothed skyline, which meant in order to head straight away from the beach, downwind, we'd have to let the sail all the way out. We arrived at the beach right when the sailboat-rental place opened. Seagulls pocked the sand, pecking at trash. A shirtless guy with a faint life-jacket tan dragged the fourteen-foot flat-bottomed Sunfish knockoff down to the water, where he flipped it over and tied the mast upright while we cinched tight sun-bleached life jackets that smelled like seaweed, sweat, an old basement. We'd have to wait to put the rudder and splintery daggerboard down until we were in the water, deep enough that the wood meant to keep us going straight wouldn't get stuck in the sand.

I'd been sailing for a decade, mostly at summer camp in northern Wisconsin, where we'd play pirates on a lake whose other side—the peeling birches, the spit of sand and rocks—you could easily see from the shore. There in that lake, I learned the nuances of sail trim and the wind clock, a conceptual diagram that dictates how far out the sail should be when the boat is pointing a certain...