I have always been called to the wind, writes Rico Provasoli.
I have always been called to the wind.
Called to any activity creating a breeze through my hair. At four years old, I put my feet up on the handle bars of my tricycle and let it race down a hill next to our home. On my final run, I hit a rock and went flying. Twelve stitches in my chin was a fair trade for the beginning of my adventure of chasing the wind.
I saved my quarters and dimes to buy a three-speed English bike, giving me enough zip to blast down hills, again and again to feel the rush of air across my face.
And then I felt the call to take up skiing in Vermont, a four-hour drive from my boring-me-to-tears private men’s college. My sketchy VW Bug barely made it up the hills. I gasped into the parking lot, grabbed my beater Head skis, rushed to the ticket window, and jumped off the chair lift before I should have. After picking myself and gear off the snow, a crowd snickering, I crashed and burned down every possible run until the Ski Patrol warned me that I’d be banned from their slopes. “Hey, buddy, you’re out of control and you scare all the parents of kids learning to ski.”
“I know what you mean, pal, cuz this is only my third day and I’ve never had the dough for a lesson. Ain’t it grand how these old skis go crazy fast but I still haven’t learned yet how to stop ‘em.”
There were moments when I was freed from gravity, the near ecstasy of gliding across the Earth, unbound, no longer plodding through life, sometimes actually get launched, soaring through the air like some circus trapeze star. I mean, if there is a heaven, it had to feel something like this.
But then, as Bob Dylan’s scratchy voice wailed through my crackling AM speakers: Oh, I started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff. I went to college in Grenoble, France on my Junior year abroad. Hating classrooms more than ever, especially when I daydreamed out the university windows, gazing at the holy majesty of the snow-covered Alps. I applied for a job at L’Alpe D’Huez, a world-class ski resort only 60 miles away. This was hard core stuff.
Every morning I’d stomp my feet to stay warm on the cable car floor, our ascent taking us to the top of the world below. I bailed from the cable car with two other native sons, watching the sun rise over Italy, then we’d race the fourteen kilometers to the valley across snow fields exquisitely pristine after five inches of powder. I was a goner. There’d be no going back to school.
After a hundred days of perfect conditions, brilliant blue sky, crisp powder every morning, on one afternoon run I stopped to survey the peaks, the silence, the almost heart-wrenching beauty. A voice in me whispered: It can’t get better than this. I quit my job.
In Grenoble I met a few art students who invited me to a motorcycle auction by the Gendarmerie in Lyon, a four-hour drive. Two days later I started my BMW touring days over much of Europe. No helmet, the wind in my hair, for thousands of kilometers. All was going fine and dandy until a mountain blowout on my front tire with no guardrail between me and the three thousand-foot drop. And that close call was also a message from some inner wisdom (which I generally ignored) to leave the wreck and never again flaunt my luck.
Until the next chapter of airborne adventures called me. Not unlike those sirens Ulysses encountered. He lashed himself to a mast to avoid their fatal hypnotic trance. The mast I lashed myself to was on a windsurfer in Hawaii.
For two years I lived in a beach house, trained sixty hours weekly to qualify for the World Cup. No traffic lanes to obey, no police to answer to, no fuel to buy. Freedom. Bronzed body, sun streaked hair, wind washing all memory away of what kind of career I should be chasing. And then one magical afternoon, after a couple of thousand hours of skipping across the turquoise waters, small waves letting my board a jump to get airborne a few seconds, that same voice spoke. It can’t get better than this. I’d had enough.
But the call of the wind found another way to lure me. A buddy spied a flyer on a bulletin board, a few days later we had an introductory lesson to paragliding. Two weeks later I bought my own wing, flying by the seat of my pants for hundreds of flight time hours, soaring the cliffs above Ocean beach in San Francisco. I met a few European hotshot pilots who invited me to stay at their mountain home in the Swiss Alps, home to the World Cup.
After two days of training with them to understand the treacherous and fickle alpine air currents, I competed, came in dead last only to later kiss the earth after getting caught in a merciless updraft above 14,000 feet. I was in my death rattles with hypothermia, dizziness, brain fog and an altimeter that screamed warnings that I was beyond the last safety zone. I chattered through my blue lips every deity’s name I’d ever heard: Mother of God, Mary, Buddha, Allah. Please tell Mom I’m sorry…
When I finally descended from the thunderheads, my reflexes dulled from cold, fear and frostbite, I’d had enough. And that was the end of my daredevil adventures in the sky of blue. My flight school guru said it poetically. “Hang up your wing, pal, because you have used up all your free passes.”
Well, not until the voice called. I was introduced to dinghy sailing with instructors who insisted I had a natural feel for it. It must have been from years of having survived close calls with sharks, thermal updrafts and other hazards I’d had a knack for surviving.
Somehow, it gave me a sense of which way the wind blows. But soon I was offered positions to crew on big boats. And before I could stop myself, I owned my own boat. Generally regarded as a mistake unless you had money to burn. But alone at the helm, the wind caressing me (or scaring the bejesus out of me), I’d found the stability of ocean sailing a cure for the search for the perfect moment of a breeze on my face.
But once again a voice whispered that this was never going to feed me what I’d hankered for. I sold everything, then waited for the next madcap idea to take over.
One evening a friend called, urging me to go to a local bookstore to listen to a Zen teacher. I dismissed the invitation, then went anyway. The woman with short white hair impressed me, her voice as light as someone who’d had the wind in her hair without ever leaving her Zen meditation cushion.
I would eventually understand that what she’d reflected was what the Zen elders had described as Spacious Mind. A vast inner expanse of peace, of freedom from wanting something other than inner stillness. I wasn’t convinced if I was a candidate for her monastery but her example offered the best shot I’d come across for wind in my hair without risking my neck.
So off I’d go to countless retreats, training the chattering mind which always had a better idea on how to get my life back on track. How could you settle for a boring practice of sitting alone on a black cushion facing a wall?
After wrestling against every reason my mind spewed as a hopeless effort, one fine morning on the cushion I discovered that what I’d hankered for in chasing wind in my hair was actually inside me when I got quiet enough to feel it.
And several decades later, with my hair mostly gone, groaning as I wheeze and creak getting up from the meditation cushion, I daily feel like the luckiest guy alive. To have listened to that voice whispering to me, urging me, into that bookstore.
This article was also published in goodmenproject.com
Photo by Getti Images via Unsplash
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