"It has a spirituality," Cree says, his voice somehow holding the softness of summer. "You can't see the wind blow, but you can see whatever it hits."
Outdoors, strong gusts push the temperature to minus-30 degrees. Indoors, fluorescent bulbs glow over Cree and a circle of men and women preparing to pray for endurance during the harshest season. As hands strike drums in the center of the circle, Matthew Orcutt, 28, bellows the first words of a long-sung song of survival.
Cree, 54, his gray hair flowing freely, concludes: "But the old people that were spiritual, they were able to see the wind. They would be able to see the spirit of the wind."
In this land long since tilled for cash crops - whether amber waves of grain, oh-so-yellow canola, or high-stalked sunflowers - many now hope the unseen wind will bring salvation to all of us, or at least to those who live on the plains.
As the wider world awakens to the need for alternative energy, hundreds of wind turbines have taken root in fertile soil from one end of North Dakota to the other. Wind farms with hundreds more towers are in the works, a boom of development that boosters say could turn the heartland into a breezy breadbasket: Distant corporations and local families stand to profit, and people from coast to coast could benefit from a more diversified energy industry that puts wind to work.
It may seem a chilling prospect, to come and measure this force of wind in winter, when a biting breeze can freeze cheeks in minutes, or even kill in little more time than that. Yet bundle well, because venturing outdoors brings an encounter with the stark winter beauty of the plains: sky softer in its blanket of blue, snow sparkling and sharp, the expanse of space at once intimate and intense. And such extremes of the season encourage people to huddle in heat, whether in farmhouse kitchens, Main Street bakeries, or cabs of trucks hauling wheat to market.
Climb in, then, alongside Thomas Schill, a farmer near the northeastern town of Langdon, as the wind makes the truck windows tremble. Schill has just dropped hard red spring wheat at the Milton elevator, and is only a few miles from home.
