Screaming Katabatic Williwaws

A few nights ago I was reading the following paragraph when suddenly I felt upsmacked with a baseball bat while simultaneously ferociously massaged by a 120-volt current.


The seaman’s traditional rounding of Cape Horn was really the whole passage from 50 degrees south to 50 degrees south around the bottom of South America, either from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the harder, meaner passage against the prevailing westerlies. That 1,000-mile passage contained so many attendant terrors – storms, drifting glacial ice, currents, and the screaming katabatic williwaws of Tierra del Fuego, Slocum’s white-arched squall – that could stop a ship and shove her backward along her wake, making her lose in an afternoon sea miles that had taken weeks of desperate struggle to gain, that not until the latitude of 50 degrees south in the destination ocean had been reached could the Horn be safely said to be astern. That was the full meaning of rounding the false cape Moitessier saw across the moonlit sea.

– A Voyage for Madmen, by Peter Nichols, chapter 23.


I don’t exactly know what it means, but I promise you this: If I ever get a novel published, I will sneak that phrase

SCREAMING KATABATIC WILLIWAWS

into it.

Bet on it. I have never heard a more awesome conjunction of consonance before. Or since. If I was a Stevie Ray Vaughan, that’d be the name of my backing band. If I was a member of a Supergroup, like CSN&Y, GTR, ABBA, ETC, that’d be the name of my solo album. If I was the next Scorsese, the next Hitchcock, the next Shyamalan, the next Welles, that would be the whispered clue that explains The Whole Thing in my cinematic masterpiece, a la “rosebud” in Citizen Kane.

Screaming Katabatic Williwaws. You will be in my dreams – or nightmares – tonight.


(Note: a couple minutes googling tells me that a “screaming katabatic williwaw” is, basically, a very fast, nasty down-wave whirlwind. “Williwaw” is Inuit for “whirlwind.” Williwaws in the region described above have been noted to travel as fast as 150 to 200 mph.)