Tilting at Windmills

These ghastly wind turbines have to go. They are a blight on the natural landscape that once made our wide-open American spaces welcoming and beautiful—now rent with the hard edge of pointlessness.

It was May 1, 2024 and I was headed home.

I was somewhere west of Galloway, Michigan; I had just gone to the Freeland Trump rally at an airport up near Saginaw. It was a wonderful afternoon, the weather was good, and the sun was dipping down toward the Western horizon.

I have a habit of looking for “the road less travelled”; sometimes when I don’t have to be anywhere particular on time, I’ll let God point me to new experiences.

I used to do that every weekend in California for a few years, heading up into the mountains, or out into the orchards, or over toward the Pacific Coast. The journey, not the destination, being the thing.

I’d study the map beforehand, pick a reservoir or secluded beach as a destination, and pick out a twisty, small road that meandered through the hills going nowhere in particular to get there—the twistier, the better. That was the road I would choose.

I discovered so many hidden gems in those days; I visited places most people would never think of going to. I also used to take my drone with me, and on one trip (similar to this one) I got myself in a bit of trouble.

I had parked on the side of a twisty hillside road to take some drone video, and a wind gust blew my drone into a tree. It fell to the ground a few hundred yards ahead, but I wasn’t quite sure where.

I used its GPS signal to try to find it; for a while I thought it was in a ravine off the side of the road. So, I found a place that didn’t look too steep, and I scrambled down the hill into the forest to try to find it.

It wasn’t where I thought it should be after 20 minutes of searching, and as I tried to get back up onto the roadway, I realized that I was going to have a really, really hard time getting back up. There were piles of wet leaves about eight inches thick, and the slope was really steep, so I couldn’t find a foothold to climb back up!

Eventually, I found a bush halfway up the hill that I could grasp onto, and pull myself up, hand over hand…but I was still short of the roadway, and I wasn’t as young and energetic as I imagined myself still to be.

I eventually found some other branches to grab onto, my boots scrabbling on mud and wet leaves looking for purchase, and I eventually pulled myself up, exhausted. I lay on the side of the road for a bit to catch my breath.

Just then, a pickup drove by, and seeing me stretched out by the roadside gasping, the guy asked me if I was alright; I laughed, said yes, I was just looking for a lost drone and got myself stuck. “Oh”, he said, “I saw your drone just down the road, it’s on the other side near that big tree.”

Turns out I didn’t need to scramble down into that ravine in the first place. And so, I eventually found the broken drone. Good thing there were no bears or coyotes down that ravine…

Well anyhow…that was my unanticipated extra adventure for that day; I ended up at Whale Rock Reservoir in the hills overlooking the Pacific.

So where was I, lost in this storytelling? Oh yes, back to Michigan, and my new adventure on a different road less travelled. And these…windmills.

On this warm May evening, I was headed through the countryside, having already decided not to return to the freeway to get back home. When I reached a four-way intersection out in farm country, I thought: “left, right or straight? Let’s go…(mental coin-flip) …. left.” and so I did.

The weather was gorgeous, so I rolled down the window a bit to smell the breeze. I had some relaxing music playing (It might have been this song, one of my favorites.) In the distance, I started to see the tops of wind turbines peeking through the distant treetops, and my heart sank a bit. I really despise those things.

But I drove on.

As I got closer, I started getting queasy. Because the sun was cutting eastward at a sharp angle (sundown was less than an hour away) I could see shadows of trees cutting across the blacktop up ahead. But then I noticed something odd.

Have you ever driven alongside a power line system, in which one of the three lines is rotated on the pole every so often? At certain times of the day, as you’re driving parallel to the wires, the shadows from the sun make it look like there is a serpentine pattern oscillating on the roadway as you drive along, when the sun catches the rotating power line’s sag and projects it onto the roadway.

For a second, I thought that’s what I saw up ahead crossing the empty roadway. But then I realized…the power lines weren’t near the road here—and the shadow was moving, not stationary as I approached it.

Instead, what I was seeing were the shadows cast by the giant wind turbines as the sun set behind them. When you rolled down the window, you could almost hear the low frequency “whump…whump…whump” as the blades cut through the air.

As I looked down the empty road ahead, I saw these oscillating shadows disconcertingly cutting angrily and angularly across the road. When I got closer, it was rather disturbing; you can’t really use the car’s sun visor to mask the effect, and at that time of day, the shadows were sharp and stark. It was disorienting.

I had trouble focusing on the road ahead, as every few seconds a shadow would wash over the car. I was driving a 2018 Model 3 Tesla at that time (how that came to be is a story for another day; I never thought I would own one, least of all drive one—using autopilot—through the fields of Michigan to Saginaw for a Trump rally.)

The car has a glass dome over the roof, so I really got the full effect of the shadow cast.

here is Tommy the cat enjoying the top of the Tesla.

I had just gotten the FSD package for the Tesla a few weeks before (Full Self Driving) and I had to turn it off, for fear that the car would react badly to the sharply moving shadows, thinking perhaps there were vehicles ahead driving erratically.

As I got closer, I saw a few farmhouses to the left and the right of the road, which looked strangely empty, even though the homes looked well kept. I pulled over at one point to take a few pictures and absorb the scene.

I can’t imagine living in a home that close to these turbines; besides the low frequency vibrations, and the minute pressure waves that they cause which make your ears tingle, there is something worse. Twice a day, at sunrise and sunset the shadows they cast cut wide, dark swaths across the windows of the house every few seconds.

I suppose if you had epilepsy, it would trigger a seizure.

I don’t have epilepsy, but even still I couldn’t bear having the natural sunlight coming through my windows “flicker” off and on every few seconds, particularly during the golden hour of early morning or late evening. What a miserable disaster.

Those properties were now ruined by the ghastly wind turbines the Green Nude Deal people (who live in the cities and never see these things) seem to relish. At that exact time of day, the Sun was a brilliant gold; it otherwise would have been a brilliant sunset out in the fields.

But those ghastly shadows…destroyed the tranquility.

The experience took me back to the summer before, when Emily and I were driving my truck with all my belongings jammed into a 14’ trailer across country. We left California on my birthday, and made it to Michigan where we live now about five days later.

The Great American Road Trip, Route 66: the Sierra, the deserts, the canyons, the great plains.

Along the way, we ended up near Amarillo, TX in the darkness, long after sunset.

As we approached the city (ironically, playing the song America by Simon and Garfunkel, which mentions Saginaw! How many times have these time loops happened with Emily and me), we saw these eerie red lights blinking far off in the distance, in a disturbing and ghostly synchronized pattern, stretching out toward the horizon.

Kathy, I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've come to look for America
Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"
America, by Simon and Garfunkel

Hundreds….thousands of these blinking red lights, like the eyes of furtive night jackals.

Stretching as far as we could see. We weren’t sure if they were oil derricks, or what they were. It didn’t become clear what they were until the next morning, as we left the hotel and drove East through the foggy grey of dawn.

They were giant fields of wind turbines, and the red lights were warning lights for aircraft at the top of the blades. The once tranquil beauty of the great wide-open spaces of the American West is now ruined by the spectre of these ghastly turbines, many non-operational.

I’ll have more to say about turbines from a more technical point of view in the time ahead; among the fifty or so draft posts that I still have in various states of completion is another one about wind turbines and the Grid.

Look for the coming post “The Grid: The problem of government is that it is comprised of people who don’t understand how anything works who nevertheless make policies to decide how everything is supposed to be” which is coming soon.

Lovely title, don’t you think? Except perhaps now, it is becoming less true as competence slowly returns to government.

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