Culled
March 8 2026
You can feel it, as well as hear.
There are the smells it brings.
While near the coast, it tastes of salt
dead fish
decomposition.
And in the high Atacama
it sucks you dry,
parching throats and cracking lips,
turning eyes to grit,
and desiccating skin
until it bleeds.
But you can’t see the wind.
Just trees, bending before it,
smoke swirling,
leaves skirling over the ground.
So if seeing is believing
then there would be no wind.
And if a thing can be invisible
yet still material
then who knows what we’re missing.
Perhaps we do have souls
and they might even outlive us.
Perhaps there really are ghosts,
trapped
with unfinished business
in the haunts where they once lived
struggling to be heard.
We are mere specks,
bottom-dwellers
in a great ocean of air
that moves in tides, rivers, and gyres,
sweeps down mountainsides,
and rises by the sun;
all of it invisible
and ruled by a physics
too complex to predict.
Except this time we were warned.
As if knowing could protect us;
as if we weren't at the mercy of wind
and nature didn’t rule.
So when I woke up that morning
and saw a dead spruce had come crashing down
— half buried in the snow
with shattered branches all around —
there was only resignation.
And a grudging gratitude, however reluctant
that the towering tree
had barely missed the house.
That night
a high pressure system had come barrelling in;
the kind of wind
where can you shout your lungs out
and not be heard,
furious gusts
that could strip a roof of shingles
and hold all your weight
leaning face first
up on your toes.
A wind that scoured the earth
and culled the woods
of its dead, infirm, and infested.
Yet despite the cacophony
I somehow slept.
So some might say a cleansing wind
while others see only destruction;
the fence it crushed,
the fallen spruce,
the smaller trees it blasted through.
The propane tank
it barely missed by inches.
And the morning after
the piercing whine of chainsaws
and the clearing of brush.
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