Editorial April 29, 1996 Issue

A lesson riding on the wind

William E. Moody

And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them (Job 37:21).

The great naturalist John Muir once wrote of riding through a windstorm. Not aboard a sailing ship on the ocean, or some smaller craft skidding along a gale-swept lake. But atop a Douglas spruce, one hundred feet up, on the highest ridge he could find in the Sierra forests of California.^{The Wilderness World of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954), PP. 182–190 .}

It was a crystal-clear December day in 1874, and Muir had eagerly climbed to the top of that tree for the very purpose of riding the wind—to hear its music and see the brushstrokes of light and color sweeping across the landscape. And this was no slight storm he encountered either. The wind had been roaring through the forest for hours, felling other trees around him "at the rate of one every two or three minutes...."

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