September 4, 2002

The Storm

I was trying to get to sleep, unsuccessfully, when I began to realize I’d been hearing thunder for some time now. The sound was low and quiet, but unmistakeable, and was nearly continuous, which is not typical of thunder in New England. I opened my eyes and immediately saw the flashes on the ceiling. I got up, pulled on shorts, stuck a flashlight in my back pocket (I’ve been through this before) and headed to the sliding glass door in the kitchen.

The night sky was alive with energy. Light was racing back and forth across the sky, lighting up the clouds like paparazzi. The thunder was already louder than when I first noticed it, and the sound was getting less muffled, sharper. I paused to shut down and unplug the computer and cable wire, and the TV cabinet in the living room, then returned to my post to watch the show, which by now had grown stronger still. I started counting. It was hard to do, because the sky seldom stayed dark long enough to complete a count. I decided the storm was striking 2-3 miles away.

In the brief pauses, it was completely still. No wind, no bullfrogs, no cars, not even the sound of rain. The deck at my feet was dry. And the flashes continued, stronger and more frequent than ever. “Heat lightning?” I wondered, and quickly dismissed. I knew that lightning wasn’t just sparks between clouds.

I don’t know how long I stood there. As the light and sound grew more powerful I was absorbed in the beauty and power of it. I started seeing not just the reflections, but the lightning itself. Long, thick strands from the clouds to the horizon. Jagged, vein-like threads. A bright line straight down, with a branch shooting off sideways into some other pocket of pent-up energy. “Borrowing from the power grid” I thought. The thunder turned into sharp snaps surrounded by crackling ripples of sound, like a piece of weathered wood slowly breaking in strong hands. I was seeing strikes to either side and in front of me, the strikes behind me lighting up the trees differently. In front, it backlit the trees into dark silhouette masks. Behind me it lit up the front of the trees like flashbulbs, green branches in blue light, like too much fluorescent light in an office.

I heard a rushing sound growing for half a minute, then the rain reached me. It started as scattered splats of large raindrops against the deck, and the ferocity of the lightning ratcheted up another notch. Moments later, the wall of water hit, and the peaceful stillness of the ground was swept away by the urgency of the falling rain. The storm was no longer “up there”. It was everywhere. The breathtaking frenzy of the rain surrounded me and swept me up. I no longer felt like a spectator. Now it felt more like a thrill ride. The gutters filled and the sound of cascading water against aluminum was added to the dull vibration of the wood deck, the hollow reedy hammering on the cover of the gas grill, the zipping of raindrops hitting the screen, and the constant background whooshing of millions of raindrops against millions of leaves.

Lightning struck all around me. Too fast to count, too close to need to. Sometimes there was no pause at all between the flash and the explosion. Behind me, I heard the cordless phone bleat. The power had blinked again. “I should have unhooked the cable from the TV.” Too late now. I wasn’t about to touch that wire. Not for anything. The hairs on my arm suddenly stood straight up and I instinctively backed away from the screen to the safety of the living room. Three rapid blinding flashes exploded with a wave of sound you felt as well as heard. The floor shuddered under my feet and glass clinked in the cabinets. I heard a cat behind me bolt for cover. I thought “Lord, I’d rather be around to tell the story tomorrow, but I have to watch this. I’m counting on you to let me” and I moved back to the screen.

For nearly three hours I stood watching this. It moved in waves, and I followed, from the back door to the front, as the storm progressed. Then to the back door again as the next wave came. Three or four times I moved back and forth as the storm rippled past, finally gradually settling into the distance over the hill in front of the house. The treetops were still lit up like daylight when I packed it in and headed for bed. I lay in bed in the dark watching the lightning play across the ceiling, hearing the force of the rain ebb and flow as the tendrils of the storm passed overhead, and fell asleep.

The Dream.

The first thing I remember is walking into the kitchen and seeing a puddle of water in the corner near the cellar door. The puddle was growing rapidly. I looked up and saw that a dramatic flow of water was coming down the wall from the corner of the ceiling, down the wall, onto the edge of the litterbox, along the baseboard, and onto the floor. I realized that water must have accumulated in the attic from the storm, and had now found an exit. I wondered how much water was up there.

I looked behind me and saw that the landlord was outside the kitchen door installing a screen/storm door (something that is indeed on his to-do list) so I told him about the water. “That’s nothing” he replied, and instructed me to go get some tool from the drawer in the kitchen. When I couldn’t find it he came inside and said “check out the cellar. You won’t like it.”

When I got to the middle of the cellar stairs and looked about, I thought “This is nothing.” The water was barely enough to wet the carpet scraps scattered around here and there on the floor. Suddenly a jet of water shot 30 feet across the cellar from a crack in the wall, hitting the bicycle leaning against the far side. This highly pressurized jet of greenish water repeated itself every 15 seconds or so. The abrupt and unrestrained force of it was stunning, and the implications of the built-up pressure behind that wall was chilling.

I called up the stairs to my former housemate Jill (who wouldn’t have been there, except it was a dream mixing today with yesterday, recalling a day several years ago when I called her down to see the flooded cellar) to come down and see my own little version of Old Faithful, and of course, it stopped as soon as she got there. She was a little cold and resentful towards me, which is in fact somewhat reflective of current circumstances. You have to love how dreams speak to you. She went back upstairs and I explored in the cellar a bit, long enough to realized not everything down there was out of harm’s way, but too late to fix that.

I went back upstairs and stepped out the front door to show the landlord the groundhog’s handiwork under the front stoop, and as I was opening the door he excitedly said “Oh, you gotta see this.” I looked out the doorway onto a writhing landscape of dark water and forlorn looking islands of trees. It was clear to me that the entire neighborhood was under water at least 20 feet deep. The water was neither rushing like floodwaters nor lapping like a lake. Rather, it was milling about kind of purposelessly, as if it had come rushing in there with a sense of purpose, only to find itself full of excitement and nothing to do. Then I realized with a start, and looked more carefully to confirm, that it wasn’t level, but sort of followed the lay of the land, filling low spots and curving more shallow over high spots, but decidedly not leveling out, not rushing like a river. “There goes my grass seed” I thought stupidly. The I realized there was no way to go any farther than the front stoop, and the strangely black water didn’t seem to want to allow me any further.

That’s all I remember. It’s a lousy place to end a story, but since I’m just recounting, making up an ending would be wrong.

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