Two nights out of three, it woke me up last week—the slow, persistent rumble of thunder, loud at first, then gradually softer, roiling across the mountaintop, then down into the valleys.
Next came the rain. Ping. Ping-ping-ping. Growing ever more insistent, until it became a downpour, one that would last until dawn.
It was a good summer up here in the hills, which, just as it is down in the desert, translates to plenty of rain. Tall grass competed of late with the black-eyed Susans for sun along the roadways, while mushrooms sprouted wherever there was shade.
Though friends have reported a bear or two in their neighborhoods, I’ve yet to see one this season, a welcome sign that they’ve had plenty of berries up in the highlands.
Just as you need rain to bring on the berries, more often than not the rain is preceded by lightning and thunder. The fiercest lightning I’ve ever encountered has been here in the high country. I’ve seen trees split in two by a lightning bolt, smelled the smoke and sulfur afterward.
Little wonder I no longer camp among the pines. But even here, within the safety of my house, lightning has done its dance. Three summers ago, it struck the middle of the road out front, coursing enough electricity into our house to knock out an alarm system, driveway lights, and a television set.
Darkening desert skies also bring forth plenty of fire power. Years ago, we were trapped in our car during a lightning storm zigzagging through the Tucson Mountains. I stayed perfectly calm, falsely believing the car’s rubber tires would keep us safe. Turns out, it’s the metal frame directing lightning currents to the ground that keeps you safe, according to AccuWeather.com.
Caveats, of course, abound, with convertibles, open windows, fiberglass exteriors and electrical systems all vulnerable to a lightning strike.
Even so, those of us who’ve been around such storms, particularly during monsoon season, tend to grow blasé when it comes to thunder and lightning. Long ago, during a visit to my brother’s home in Oregon, we were awakened by the crash of lightning and thunder outside the window just above our heads where we were sleeping. We got up, closed the window and went back to sleep. The next morning we were amazed to see bold front page headlines in the local paper about the “big storm” the night before.
I was not always so sanguine when it came to lightning and thunder. As a child, I grew up with the story of my grandmother’s brother, struck dead as a young man by lightning as he stood in the doorway of his mother’s farmhouse.
Perhaps as a result, I would often work myself into a lather whenever a storm poised ready to strike, crying out that we were all going to die and imploring Jesus to save us.
During one of these “fits” my aunt could no longer take it, giving me a well-deserved slap in the face and hissing at me to stop. It worked. Never again would I succumb to such hysteria.
Instead, I reverted to the more childish recognitions of impending storms, joining in with my friends to the singsong: “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring,” as well as the ever-popular explanation for thunder in the first place — that it’s merely “the old woman rolling potatoes under the bed.”
May those potatoes—and the rains that follow—continue to roll this fall for a little while longer.
