Always the wind. Always in your hair, caressing your face. And you struggle against it often enough. And the sound of wind is all around. It’s the sound of cycling.

Wind is an ambient wizard, a punching impro artist, free jazzing and howling across sky and hills, screaming down to earth. How cruel wind can sound when pedalling against heavy gusts and crawling across the open fields. A proper storm’s composition is relentless music, unforgettable and spellbinding.

90 kilometres almost due north today into Provincie Utrecht, pedalling into never ceasing wind. No storm, but strong and punching. Though as tired as you might get during such long days of cycling, you can’t stop listening to the wind. Its never ceasing noise is blinding, entangling, crawling under your skin. Wind sings for you wherever you go. Its coloraturas are extraordinary, free form and unique masterpieces from scratch. It whispers and talks in foreign tongues. It howls and cries out your misery cycling into it.

Wind will always be there for you. Wind music never stops and never fails to entertain. Far away it calls and whistles after you through fences and hedges every yard of the way. Slyly it sweeps over walls and rustles sound snippets of secret places in branches and leaves.

Wind is there under blue skies and in heavy showers. Its conducting thunder storms, orchestrates local showers and sunny spells. Wind is the ultimate weather maker and bears down on you at every bend in the road.

And wind gives you time – sometimes the time of day. It slows and holds and keeps you, sussurates and mumbles into your ears, sparking your eyes up to the landscape around. Wind wants you to stop and stay, take a breather sometimes. Wind lets you feel sun or rain in your face. Wind makes space and time curve while cycling. Wind opens your ears to the sound of what you see and feel. Wind is surface sound.

Cycling cross country you get immersed deep into all this noise and sound, powered and pummeled by the endless, never ceasing wind. Life is wind, you might say. But for sure wind is sound. And it accompanies you pedaling up and down the landscape of life. The wind is your travel guide, it whistles all around.

And wind is there too one day cycling along the Wilhelmina Canal in Brabant. I follow the almost straight waterway for hours into this never quietening head wind. It’s late afternoon and the summer at its low end. It’s only my second day of cycling and I’m tired. But there are still 20 kilometres to go.

But a sign points to ‘La Trappe’. And if you are a beer aficionado you know what lies only a mile away. One of only twelve Trappist Breweries worldwide. Right here on my way to Krankenhaus. And I know better than to anger any gods and shun their brew. So off I turn and leave the wind alone for a drink. ‘Taste the silence’ it says in the garden of the ‘proeflokaal’ where you can savour the monk’s brewing art. Dubbel or Triple, Puur or Blond. God only knows, why they don’t speak while brewing and drinking this excellent stuff.

Even the wind has calmed when I return to the Wilhelmina Canal after two reasonable drinks of the monk’s holy hop. With weary legs I reach at last my accomodation for the night, one of my beloved Dutch nature campsites.

The night is cold and clear. Stars shine in massive array and the odd satelite or aircraft blinks its way across the heavens. I brought some cheese, bread and sacred beer from the abbey shop. It’s one of those nights that reward you for a hard day of cycling. I count the stars in the falling silence over the campsite. I try to pick the shooting stars that speed across the Milky Way. And finally even the wind falls silent, stops whispering for a few hours of the not so far away sea. It probably dreams of cycling in its corner of the sky. And I taste the silence of sleep…

Christoph x