Wind, water, fact, and fiction: when you read literature in college, you read for theme or meaning, not for wind and water. You are taught that Sancho and Huck are realists; Tom and Don Quixote are romantics. There is something about teaching books that can steal their souls. Nothing is the same after you explain it

World Literature Today, July-August, 2008 by Robert Day

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When I was a young reader of novels in Kansas, I thought Don Quixote had a better view of the world than Sancho Panza: those were not windmills on Spain's distant hills but real knights in real armor ready to do real battle. Cervantes understood: no knights, no adventure; no adventure, no story. Windmills might be useful for pumping water out of the ground or grinding grist for polenta. But they were of better use for baking fiction. Not that I knew that then, but I knew something.

On the other hand, at about the same age I took Huck Finn's view of the world: Tom's robbers and funerals and jewels in Tom Sawyer and, at the end of Huckleberry Finn, his perpetual freeing of Nigger Jim from an imaginary prison using rules from only the finest romances (Tom, too, had read Don Quixote) was a silly fantasy conjured by the same Tom Sawyer who was trying to con me into whitewashing his fence: Not so fast.

To Huck, the real world was real enough: the mark of Pap (a cross in the left boot-heel to keep off the devil); the sights and sounds and smells of the Mississippi that envelop the raft as it floats down river (Toward night it began to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around, low down in the sky, and the leaves was beginning shiver ...); the ball of lead the woman in St. Petersburg tosses at Sarah Mary Williams (a.k.a. Huck Finn) in his dress and that he catches like boy, closing his legs instead of spreading them to open her skirt. And in that same scene, the test Huck passes over how horses and cattle stand up (I, too, passed the test; but then I was from Kansas). Finally, there was the debate in Huck's mind about the fate of Jim that seemed especially real to me when I was young. With Mark Twain's help, both Huck and I passed that test as well: the lights of the Enlightenment glowing bright in a nineteenth-century American novel. Not that I knew that then.

Today I live part of my life in Western, Kansas (the W is always capitalized as if that section of the state not only has its special ecology and physiognomy--which it does--but also other singular traits, both political and cultural: the world is five thousand years old; a man's wife is called The Wife; the creeks are dry; the rest of America is called The Rest of America--all capitalized as if it were a country elsewhere--and the word Kansas means "People of the South Wind").

"It will blow the wheat out of the ground if this keeps up," says a farmer coming into the Bly Co-Op, where the Committee to Save the World meets sporadically over cowboy coffee and breakfast rolls baked by The Wife. We are trying to push winter into spring. The gardeners among us have set our tomatoes; the onions are starting up. Radishes too. Even though we know there might yet be a late blizzard in the works.

"I got fences so full of tumbleweed I can't see that I've got fences," says a buffalo rancher, beating the dust out of his hat and sitting down. The wind has been blowing hard for a week: night and day.

In the next hour or so we will solve the various problems of Bly and Whitewoman County, Kansas, plus a few for The Rest of America, if only they'd listen. And some shared difficulties as well: the high price of oil among them.

"We are," says the wheat farmer as the lights in the co-op blink off and on with a gust that rattles the windows, "the Saudi Arabia of wind."

I live another part of my life in southwestern France. It is ac country: Bergerac, Pessac, Cadillac, Gensac. Water, water everywhere--as well as wine and eau de vie--and plenty of everything to drink. Even some towns and villages are drinkable: Cognac, Armagnac. And with the water are mills: Moulin de Clotte, Moulin de Piqueroque, to name two near my small seventeenth-century stone house tucked into a hillside at the juncture of three Cote de Castillon vineyards.

This part of France is but a three-hour drive from the Spanish border, and from there another half-day's drive to the plain of La Mancha (the rain in Spain does not stay mainly on the plain). I have made that drive more than a few times over the previous twenty years; from San Sebastian (where Hemingway packs off Robert Cohn and Lady Brett Ashley, leaving Jake Barnes and the rest of the grand crew in Paris drinking up and clown Boulevard Montparnasse), to Bilbao and its Gehry Guggenheim, then south toward the route the innkeeper proscribes for Don Quixote as he "sallies forth": Granada, Salamanca, Segovia, Seville (where on my most recent trip I got a haircut: of course. Fiction into fact).

What I have noticed driving though Spain are the growing number of windmills; at first, a few on distant hillsides that took me by surprise so that I was not quite sure (unlike Sancho) what they were. Then more. And a few years ago along the Costa de la Muerte, there was a long line of them like sentinels looking out over the Atlantic. For what? Wind.

This year when I made the drive, I saw battalions of windmills north of Burgos. Then small armies farther south toward Madrid. Added together they formed a crusade of windmills, assembled not to drive infidels out of the country but instead to keep Spaniards at home in clean and well-lighted places.