August 24, 2024

✨ ode to wind turbines

a post-move missive

Dear friend—

Hello! It’s been a while. I write to you now from Idaho. I’ll be here for a year, probably. Alex and Hazel and I stretched the drive from Pennsylvania over five days. It was not as bad as I was expecting, tbh.

This was the longest drive I’d ever done or taken part in, and I had a surprisingly good time (I am an anxiously mediocre driver, and yet I struggle to stay conscious in a moving vehicle, even behind the wheel, lol). I kind of wasn’t expecting how invested I would be in seeing the landscape change from state to state. Red, scraggly mountains in Utah, with strata like layer cakes; flat farmland in Nebraska that extended infinitely into the distance and then some; dusty greige fields dotted with black cattle in Wyoming (and even a few bison); and in Iowa, wind farms.

In Pennsylvania, I don’t see many wind turbines. The state gets a measly (roughly) 1.5% of its energy from wind (less than 4% from renewables overall). Sure, I pass a few every time I travel along the Turnpike. But seeing a handful scattered in a field is nothing like an honest-to-God wind farm.

Iowa, on the other hand, produces more wind energy than any other state besides Texas. It gets a honking 60% of its energy from wind. When I visited Alex last year, we drove from Iowa City to a friend’s place in Grinnell, about an hour away. On that drive, we passed through a wind farm that extends on either side of Route 80 as far as the eye can see. The turbines towered so tall, I got a bit of vertigo just looking up at them.

We headed back to Iowa City close to midnight, and something they don’t tell you about wind farms is that they shine pinprick, pulsing red lights at night (probably to ward off birds and airplanes). So it’s pitch black and all you see beyond the road, 360 degrees around, is dozens, hundreds of red eyes slowly blinking at you in perfect sync.

(Sorry to include a video from an anti-wind advocacy group, but this is the only video I found that came close to capturing what it felt like to see this.)

Despite the aforementioned vertigo, I didn’t really appreciate the size of these things until a few weeks ago, when we drove past a semi-truck transporting a turbine blade in Wyoming.

All this brought a visceral stab of longing to see them everywhere, and made me wonder how anyone could call them eyesores (a frequent talking point of both genuine opponents and astroturf groups run by the fossil fuel industry).1 Spotting wind farms in Iowa really felt like how I imagine it would be to see a pod of dolphins or whales on the open ocean.

It reminded me of the word “sublime”—which used to be used to describe not just things that are great or grand or awe-inspiring, but things that were beyond human comprehension or power. That kind of gut terror and wonder that we feel when we stand at a canyon’s edge, or while seeing a bolt of lightning fork through a dark sky—that’s kinda how I felt seeing these wind turbines.

And these things that are so awe-inspiringly huge and move so gracefully are also helping our planet? If we had more and more of these, we just might be able to pull ourselves away from the edge of climate chaos? Whoof.

The fact that I don’t understand the science behind them makes it even better. Sure, motion makes (has?) energy. And sure, we can harness that energy. But the path from lumbering blade of metal to a glowing light bulb in my bedroom? That is actually alchemy to me. And I’m pretty cool with keeping it that way! We all need a little wonder and mystery in our lives.

Suffice it to say, I freaking love wind turbines. Pennsylvania, catch tf up!!

Much love from Idaho,

— mia xx