It Was A Dark & Stormy Night To Be Writing In The Rain

Oh, what fun it is to write when the sky is talking loudly!

Lightning! Thunder!!! Rumbles long ... sharp bursts. Piercing light that for a fraction of a second is hotter than the sun's surface.

My friends know that when most people believe the best place to be during a storm is the innermost room of a sturdy home, hunkered down just in case there's a tornado or a more sophisticated wind-shear effect, my favored place is the midst of the storm.

I have threatened to climb to the rooftop and wear a collander on my head and aluminum foil on my fingertips while sitting on an old steel rocker. No umbrella - couldn't take pictures and hold the thing.

Taking pictures of lightning is like photographing fireworks – except you must have a tripod and you must be ready to jump if you feel the hair on the back of your head start to rise.

That rising is a sure indication that you are standing on the spot where the positively charged electricity in the cloud wants to meet the negatively charged energy in the earth. It is best not to be present when they merge. The result would be shocking and it would ruin your film and your day.

Your family and friends would mutter at your graveside that they KNEW you would go out this way. In my mind, better this way than listening to Greg Fishel muttering something about a very interesting weather event taking place over mini-city.

I have, in my lifetime driven under trees and brush being swirled by an itsy-bitsy tornado. Yep, I looked up into the beast and kept on driving. It missed me by about 50 feet. It had done damage at Crossroads Ford and was going to hammer a nearby school. Me, it missed – that day.

Once, while heading to Jordan Lake to catch a sunset, I drove into a thunderstorm. Lightning, thunder and it quickly passed leaving a rainbow – 75 feet offshore. We saw the end of the rainbow. Gold coins boiling up at the surface and little leprechauns bobbing in and out. 200 yards away was the other end of the rainbow.

Fortuitous and funny and exciting. Wet and wild.

Hurricane Fran hit central NC and did a lot of damage. 7 of my friends and I missed the NC portion of the storm. We were in West Virginia – rafting in the face of the remainders of the hurricane which made the normally wild Gauley River plainly wicked. LOVED IT. Exhausted and exhilarated we came home to saw trees and clean up the damage.

“Strormy Weather” has a way of cleansing things, refreshing the heart, bringing out the primal spirit and, for me, putting me in a frame of mind to do something with my hands.

That's why I have to lay me down to sleep just now – to the sweet voice of the receding thunder – whispering, “Good night, Tim, the freshened world will be waiting for you tomorrow”.


© Tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com