Wishing for Blue Skies and Tailwinds

You might wish for blue skies and tailwinds but Susanne is trying to capture the beauty of the headwind this bicycling season.  Join her on this breezing tale to find out just how much we are blown about by something we cannot see. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, Episode 53. Wishing you blue skies and tailwinds. Wishing you blue skies and tailwinds. That's a common parting salutation for pilots. While it is a hopeful thought, it's about as effective as the old Irish saying, wishing you 30 minutes in heaven before the devil knows you're dead, offering you the hope of a perfect day, short-lived as it might be. The opposite of blue skies and tailwinds is overcast and headwinds. Cloudy skies aren't all that bad as long as they don't last forever. But headwinds, it's just plain hard to find a use for them. The only exceptions are during short takeoffs and landings. When you're a pilot, a big part of calculating your route is affected by wind speed and direction. If the wind is behind you, you'll travel faster over the ground than if there was no wind. If the wind is hitting your craft from either side, you have to angle or crab your plane towards the wind direction in order to keep a straight flight path. When there is a headwind, your progress will slow in direct relationship to the speed of the wind. And especially if you're heading home after a long day, those additional five or ten minutes feel like an oversized strain on your resilience. I don't pilot planes anymore, but I've transferred that concern for wind speed and direction to riding my bicycle. As the cycling season begins, I've been thinking about headwinds more than normal. When I plan a bike route, even a short one, I look to see which way the wind is blowing before I decide on that route. I used to look across the field to my neighbor's flag every morning before I left on a ride, but they have moved, and now I am governed by the lean of the junipers or the cool blast to my face. When I'm planning a longer route, I'll check the Acuweather app on my phone for the speed and direction of the wind and how it might change during the day. That's how I chose which way to ride over 100 kilometers from one end of Elgin County to the other on a warm October day. A west wind of 23 kilometers was forecast, and it was too good of a tailwind to ignore. On many of the local roads, I can tell you where the wind will ease up because of a row of cedar trees planted along the edge of the field, or when you will catch the full blast careening across an open block of land. On very windy days, I pedal to the rail trail where the scrubby trees that line each side of the path break the wind from most directions. There are only a few spots where the trail is unprotected from the open fields. I can ride for many undisturbed kilometers and back again. If I don't have a specific errand to complete, I plan my road routes to have the wind at my back as much as possible. Going in a loop to return home means that at some point the breeze will be hitting me in the face or broadside. So I often choose to ride into the wind outbound and have a tailwind coming home. Alas, that is almost never possible when you live near the shore of one of the Great Lakes. There's a thing called a lake breeze. I first learned about it during my introductory pilot training many years ago. As the air over the land warms up during the day, it rises, allowing the cooler air over the water to blow into that vacancy. This means that the wind is almost always blowing in from the lake during the late mornings through the afternoon. If a weather system's winds are strong and in the opposite direction, it can mollify the force of the lake breeze. I remember one particular difficult ride from home to the crazy eight barn. I was riding west on gravel roads into a strong breeze. I was pushing to make it to work at a reasonable time and was looking forward to turning south just past Dewart for an offset tailwind push towards Palmyra. As I pedaled over the ridge that runs east-west through the rural township, I was hit with a full face lake breeze. The windmills that graced the other side of the hill were twirling at an angle 90 degrees to where I had expected to see them. Even though it was supposedly downhill all the way to Lake Erie, the headwind ride almost broke me. How can I always be riding into the wind? That's the thing with headwinds. They can be perceived as making everything harder. When you are plotting a navigational course as a pilot, you don't often change the route because of the winds. Unless their velocity creates an unsafe situation. You decide which campus heading you will use to compensate for the sideways push the wind might make on your craft and the length of time the flight will take to cover the distance over the ground. Tailwind less time, headwind more time. In an aircraft, a headwind causes you to use more fuel and time to cover less ground miles. On a bicycle, it's sort of the same situation. You need to use more strength to cover less miles in a greater amount of time. In both situations, it can be frustrating to see your estimated time of arrival slip behind you as you still have more distance to travel. This is a level of stress and dissatisfaction that I've decided to reduce this bicycle riding season. I've got a new attitude towards headwinds. They will be just another natural feature on the ride that I can choose to enjoy and conquer if necessary. Like a big uphill climb. I'm not going to fight headwinds. They are only an obstacle if I am on a time deadline. Most days I can gear down, enjoy the scenery at a slower pace. Leave a little bit earlier, arrive a little later. Maybe grip the lower handles of my handlebars and take my body out of the wind. Feel the coolness of the wind on my face and don't push too hard against it. This bicycling season, I'm embracing the headwind. But I will still welcome a day of blue skies and tailwind. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazyebarn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.