Open Writing

I’d like to tell you that I clung on for dear life, passing along between trees bent almost horizontal by the wind pressure, and that I narrowly avoided being sent home in two ambulances by sheets of corrugated iron, flying tiles, and upside down cars, propelled by the most severe storm that I have ever witnessed. But although it was, I didn’t and I wasn’t, and I feel cheated.

Let me just say that I was ready for an adventure, and the kind that take you out of a settled life are the best because they wake up the whole person, and I regret that I didn’t think of getting myself out in the midst of the upheaval until the day after, when ‘all was calm all was bright.’ It is well said that ‘repartee is the answer you think of on the way home,’ and experience has taught me that the older I get the less repartic I become, and the longer the time lag between the suitable moment and the framing of the prefect parry and fatal thrust that is often a requirement in this age of cut and thrust.

Although I do not possess a Sou’wester and have not done so since I was six years old, I imagined myself abroad in the eye of the storm grappling with ratlines and jackstays as my ship was being driven onto sharp murderous reefs that would surely slice my ship, the Dolly Varden, in half and then pound her to matchwood. I saw myself gathering acres of wet and disobedient canvas sails to hold them fast against madly swaying booms until I could tie them down with sinews torn from my brawny arms. I felt the panic of a man doomed to destruction by elemental forces as I clung desperately onto a barrel as I tried to ride out the storm after my ship had exploded on the rocky bar. It was quite exhausting, and had I not been safely ensconced in my overstuffed armchair, who knows what my end might have been?

I had seen the Chinese Gum trees outside the north wall of our home thrashing wildly for some time, and Frankie, our border Collie who is unusually sensitive to thunderstorms had been in her ‘hull down, storm coming’ mode for a good hour before the faintest whiff of wind wandered through the willows.

She is unusually sensitive to nature’s turmoils and more accurate than a lowly bunch of seaweed or a highly paid meteorologist, because she is never wrong. She crept into her ‘storm corner’ and pulled her cloke of invisibility around her long before the loudest crash of lightning-cum-thunderbolt struck outside our front window.

I went outside to look and see what had been vaporised by the lightning bolt, or what size crater it had blown out of our narrow street, and try to figure out how fast I would have to drive towards the hole in the morning to clear it in a single bound of squealing tyres to get our doggies across the abyss in order to get to the dog park, but there was no sign of damage. This was surprising because the whole of our front room window had been flashed by the whitest and most intense light I have ever seen.

The strike and the thunder crash were simultaneous, which told me that the event was no further from our front door than seventeen inches, but since I am useless at arithmetic it could have been twenty or so.

The view outside was exhilarating! The rain was at saturation point and being driven at more than eighty miles an hour, gusting to ninety-five, achieving the effect of a sheet of water obscuring the houses, trees, and foliage in-between gusts at half-second intervals. The houses across the street are not more than thirty-two – it could be thirty-three - feet from our door, but for half the time I watched they were either partially or fully obliterated by a thick grey blur of supernaturally accelerated water.

Another lightning strike came as I watched, and that one did something to the street lights, plunging the place into darkness, although we were blessed that the house lights stayed on, after flickering a couple of times, presumably as the automated grid switching system transferred our load to another power source. Strike followed strike in never ending percussion, as if Napoleon’s siege of Moscow met the battle of the Somme all in a few pulsating and heaving minutes.

When this storm – the locals called it a microburst – hit us, there were so many strikes close around us that Gay believed the house had been hit and was going to disintegrate, a conclusion that did not need to be forced from the evidence of our senses. It was sudden, violent, terrible, and exciting all at once, and it seemed inevitable that great damage would ensue, either to us, or to our neighbours. In the teeth of this merciless onslaught of nature at her plangent best, I was despatched to count the exterior walls and windows and report back to my commanding officer. I was able to report, "All present and correct, Ma’am!"

Mercifully, no animals, people, or properties were hurt during these explosions of Mother Nature detonating her raw power, although some houses –ours among them - trembled, animals scuttled into corners and underneaths, and some people – well, the least said about them the better.

The next day when all was ‘bright and beautiful’ and Frankie had rejoined the general population after spending the night trembling between my darling and me on our roomy bed, I chanced to spy our video camera languishing in idleness, and roundly berated myself for not seizing it by the throat and pointing it at the wildness that, for a few sudden minutes, visited us as we were at rest in the normally calm and peaceful world in which we live.

My foray into the storm was nothing like it could have been if only I had ventured further out into its midst like an intrepid tornado-chaser, or a resolute, undercrewed skipper plying an overladen Cutty Sark, its strained-to-the-limits timbers creaking and groaning through the tumultuous sea lanes of the Roaring Forties.

Ah, well, I suppose that’s what becomes of plying a creaking, straining, and overladen Laz-E-Boy reclining chair through the doldrummed evenings of the Sedate Seventies!

Copyright © Ronnie Bray – 2007
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Other Stories by Ronnie:

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html

http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray/