Harrison Ford’s character in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” wonders aloud, “Why did it have to be snakes?” For me it’s usually wind. On Wednesday, March 2nd there was so much wind whipping through Ballard I was afraid we were going to land in Kansas.

I’ve lived through quite a few wind storms in Ballard, not as far back as the famous Thanksgiving Day storm of 1983, but the Inauguration Day storm of 2003 and the nasty one on December 16, 2006, with one in between that involved music piped from the Christmas Ships at the Ballard Locks being pushed through every crack of my south facing windows.

When wind is seemingly trying to break the window over my shoulder and start a shingle-trading party along the street I don’t like to be home alone. Give me hail or pounding rain, but there’s nothing creepier to me than high gusts of wind while the sun shines. It reminds me of the creepy smile of a child I used to babysit, right before she bit.

Wind in Ballard is part of a good news/bad news scenario. On one hand, early settlers felled many trees and milled them, so there are fewer trees to topple on power lines and people. On the other hand, the north-south streets are wind tunnels. Try standing on someone’s front porch on one of Ballard’s avenues and hope they let you in quickly.

During the 2006 windstorm which mostly did its damage overnight, my then-neighbor gave up on trying to sleep. He sat with a thermos of coffee and watched the lightshow as electrical transformers blew to the south. In the morning everyone emerged to check for damages; noting that the sun rises even without a working alarm clock.

Normally I love working from home, but during a windstorm I’d prefer to be in a windowless office, perhaps even a labyrinth of cubicles. I’m the one who sees my neighbor’s recycling cart when it goes airborne and feel obliged to chase the newspapers and plastic up the alley where they’re being pulled as though by rip tide. There’s no colleague to watch as another front appears off the edge of Magnolia, appearing like the prow of a huge tanker that forms a wall between Ballard and Bainbridge. There’s no one else to admire the rainbow in front of the Olympics or wince as hail attempts to dent cars with the menace of fire crackers.

Over the years I’ve developed my Letterman-inspired top ten list of ways to tell when it’s a dangerous windstorm: full garbage cans roll uphill and traffic lights are parallel to the street instead of perpendicular. The parking sticker blows off the car window and you chase it into the street because you paid for maximum time. In truth that cost is nothing compared to the damage totals that can accrue over the course of minutes when the wind gusts hit their mark on buildings and trees.

In like a lion, out like a lamb, or vice versa, the saying goes about March. On March 2nd it poured, it blew, it shone, it hailed, trash flew and there were rainbows. The storm seemed to have passed when I got the message. My dear friend Bob was at the Community Living Center at the Veterans Affair Hospital and, “his breathing is very slow.” Water from the latest downpour was coming down in sheets from overpasses above. Late sunshine glinting off the wet streets seemed as sinister as that child with the sharp teeth. I circled my way up to that facility that juts on Beacon Hill.

I was too late. The gusting winds had been measured at 40-50 mph but there was no breath left in my dear friend. He died between the hailstorm and the sunshine, up high on Beacon Hill where he’d lived for the last 30 years. Pancreatic cancer diagnosed just before his 60th birthday took a lion-sized man and turned him into lamb.

For the rest of my life I will think of him when the wind is strong enough to rip off the chimes and shake the windows so I think they will break. But I’m not going to be afraid of the wind anymore, even though it seemed to take Bob away last week, from now on it will always bring him back to me.

Arthur Robert Johnson, November 15, 1950-March 2, 2011 Semper Fi