Windmills

I purchased a photograph of a windmill in Holland from a Dutch photographer, Adrie Nab several years ago.  It is a beautiful photograph, and reminds me that windmills are changing.  “The iconic Dutch windmills were once state-of-the-art flood control technology. They pumped water from uninhabitable marshes and turned it into farmland, redefining the landscape of the Netherlands. Today, the Dutch have implemented other flood prevention methods, but working vintage windmills still exist.”

Wind farms, with modern wind towers,  are springing up in my part of Nebraska like summer crabgrass.  Some wind farms are up and running,  some are in development with windmill blades delivered via truck nearly every day, and some are in the planning stages.  It requires four vehicles to deliver one blade.  The front vehicle has a sign stretching across the top, “WIDE LOAD”, the second one has a rotating radar system, the third is the semi with one blade, and the forth, usually a pickup, has another rotating radar system.

Windmills of my youth pumped water for our house, livestalk, and for the garden. There is a boarded-up well on my current farmsite with a tower above it that lacks blades.  The blades blew away in one of the many wind storms buffeting this land.  A tree has  grown up inside the tower, rendering it merely decorative.