The coming Ice Age continues to be missed by the common Mediaite, as March blizzards and cool Augusts are forgotten, the place in the collective mind they should repose being occupied by hypnotic memories of warm Octobers and mild Februaries.

As a dissident mind I quite enjoy these earth changes and also revel in the fact that our media priests are entirely blind to reality. For the first time in my life—nearly all of it spent on the west shore of the Chesapeake—I have experienced deluge levels of summer rain accompanied by no wind at all. Likewise, this past Friday, I experienced winds of a force hitherto only accompanied by snow or rain…pure, earth-scouring wind.

My favorite times, throughout my little life have been spent wandering when and where others won’t go, 4 a.m. being my favorite time of day. The chance to amble about unconcerned with enemies, at a time when only the best people are out and about, is soothing.

The world was huddled inside as if for its end.

The winds whistled through Baltimore and Harford County at 70 miles per an hour, killing most of the power grid in Harford County. I was privileged to walk in both wind-driven places between 1 and 6 p.m.

As I walked towards my youngest son’s house I saw a decorative pear tree, uprooted and toppled in the front yard of a brownstone town home. As I walked more closely I was able to see that the neutered, civilized tree had a parasite, a yellow mushroom eating into its roots, which had rotted beneath its beautiful form. Consider, that the decorative pear tree is the perfect ideal National tree for Postmodern America.

Round about the natural trees swayed, sang and whipped in the brutal wind even as a green canvas awning seemed to play a drumbeat.

The great oaks and maples waved their whip-like arms monstrously above the puny roof tops.

The evergreens fairly danced, flexing before the wind like giant bow-staves bent by an invisible hand, reminding the boy who spent the better part of childhood dreaming about sailing undiscovered seas, that evergreens made the best masts, grown tall and flexible before cold wins.

One human stirred in the first hour, a middle-aged man smiling as he collected fallen branches. We greeted each other and he grinned wildly, “It’s that time of year!”

For sale signs blew horizontally in the wind, two twisting on a single hook, a few scudding across the pavement, one flopping on a thick lawn.

Service alleys were clogged with tumbled trashcans, not a citizen in this part of Towson apparently able to predict the fact that the wind blowing them against their car would blow their trashcan over. I decided to take a shortcut to my son’s house to secure his refuse containers and smiled with pride when I saw them lashed to his fence.

The wind was stronger in the recently rural bedroom community. It amazed me how much less wooded the recently rural area was than the soon-to-be blighted city extension which has been paved for two generations.

Picket fences were blown apart.

Stockade fences had slats blown away.

Post and wire fencerows were blown over.

Sections of split-log fences were blown out or in.

A sprawling, low-income apartment complex grinned in the distance.

An ancient locust tree, five feet at the base, 70 feet tall, strangled by rooted vines that grew to be as thick as my leg, had been uprooted by the wind and knocked over the path I walked. The span of dried and splintered roots at its base kicked up a crumble of clay earth the size of a pitcher’s mound, the base of the toppled tree standing as tall as the examining human. The amazing, instructive aspect of this story of the wind blow tree, was that the parasitic vine that had literally strangled this huge living thing, had its own roots that still lived, flexing taut up out of the torn soil. The felled tree and its stubborn parasite reflecting in nature the now weathered houses of another generation’s urban flight, encroached upon by the ugly edifice dedicated to the next generation’s suburban blight.