Thunder

You can’t take a picture of thunder but if the clap is close enough you can feel it in your breastbone and if the clap is really close it will knock you on your hindquarters.  Many years ago my father stood in an upstairs doorway of this ramshackle old house on a Poconos lake that we have rented every July since 1981.  A proper boomer was rolling down from the north to lash the hemlock trees and flash through the drenched sky.  Thunderstorm freak that he was, Dad stationed himself with a view across the upper deck and down to the lake so he could enjoy the pyrotechnics. FLASHBOOM!  A bolt struck a tree a hundred feet away at the end of the driveway, reduced the trunk to flying embers, shocked the air with its concussive blast, and rolled Dad backwards onto the rug.

“Wow that was a good one!”  

Those genes come through from Dad to me.  When we quit the arid and parched drought-stricken steppes of California every summer, I fly east praying for storm cells and downpours and thunder and lightning.

Maybe we are sitting around on the dock for some afternoon rays, or canoeing over to Blueberry Island to pick fruit for tomorrow’s pancakes, or watching the grandkids paddle around on their kick boards and noodles.  The sun beats down on the forest primeval and the placid waters.  In the still, damp air we can hear the conversations on the next dock and the dog barking across the lake.  The humidity wilts us and turns our thoughts towards naps.  

Come four or so, puffy clouds slide in.  The temperature drops.  A breeze stirs the air, and cools it.  Someone hears something and wonders if that was a passing 747 or distant thunder.  And then, if we are lucky, things develop.

The distant sounds of beer kegs rolling down wooden staircases approach and louden.  The puffy grey clouds blacken.  The breeze freshens and becomes wind.  I’ve never understood this, but somehow the air takes on a greenish tinge and even smells green.  The trees thrash around as if trying to escape the imminent deluge.  Then . . . the sky opens and delivers an acres-wide waterfall into the woods.  Lightning skitters across the sky to generate a prolonged rumble bumble or stabs the earth to deliver a BANG big enough to knock down a man.  

Heaven.

The sound and the sight of pouring rain refresh the marrow and the soul of a Californian more accustomed to Diablo winds, mega wildfires gobbling through the understory, and vacant stream beds.  

Rain.

I have by now lived over half a century away from the land of rain and thunder, and realize when I return here how deeply my childhood experiences impressed and etched themselves on my elderly DNA.  Rain.  Thunder.  Lightning.  Fall colors in hardwood forests.  Snow drifting down through the cone of light under a street lamp to lay a virgin blanket of white on the asphalt.  Seldom do I experience these phenomena now.  Seldom do they fail to stir me when I do.  Our pattern for decades has been to travel to the East Coast at summertime and the holidays.  But once, thirty years ago, I attended an October conference at a retreat center in the middle of New York’s Adirondack State Park.  At the conference conclusion I hitched a ride back to the Albany Airport in the van of a driver/volunteer and happened to sit in the front seat.  As we headed south through the countryside, I noticed that I was getting emotional, feeling on the verge of tears.  Huh?  What’s up?  It took me a while but then I got it.  Leafy canopies of scarlet and yellow and orange.  Rushing streams.  Granite outcroppings.  The scenery of my childhood, right there out the window.  My brain didn’t register all of that right away but my eyes and my heart did.  

As an adolescent I hated it when rain spoiled a sunny summer day.  Now it’s the other way around.  Bring it on!

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