A summer afternoon thunderstorm
the best things in life are free — Epicurus, kind of.
A few weeks ago, I was working one of these gigs that I do on Friday afternoons in a liquor store when the sky turned charcoal black and ominous. The store had large windows across the top of the building and I could see the whole sky with only a few beams of wood in the way. I couldn’t go anywhere, I was stuck behind this little table where I read books and occasionally offer shots of liquor to passersby.
Anyway, everybody else working in the store got all agitated by the thunderstorm. They went to the windows and crossed their arms and scowled at the blackening sky. When I said we’re going to have a beautiful sunset they looked at me like I had suggested we all go outside and try to fly a kite.
The air thickened and my knees ached with the pressure change. It’s true, by the way, what the old men say — if you’ve got fucked-up enough joints, they can feel the pressure changing in the air. Isn’t the human body bizarre? But my knees kept on aching and I tried to shake them out and the sky got so dark, barely any sunlight broke through. You couldn’t even see the cars at the far-end of the parking lot. And it seemed like the storm contained in those clouds might sweep over us before the sky broke open. Because how could it be any heavier and not break open?
And just when I was thinking those sort of things, there was a sort of sigh in the pressure and the rain came down in buckets. It thundered on the metal roof of the store and when people opened the door to rush inside, you could hear it pounding in the parking lot. A thick summer rain sounds a bit like a needle scratching in the center of a record, it’s got that same familiar consistency, I don’t know if you know that. The parking lot began to flood and everybody in the store became more agitated, as if they had an itch somewhere they couldn’t scratch.
I was a bit amused by the agitation in the air — by the absurdity of it. Because the only way to get rid of a summer thunderstorm is to wait it out. A summer thunderstorm is brief, you don’t have to wait too long. And, when you take a step back, there’s nothing so awful about a summer thunderstorm. Anybody prefers the warm-sweet rain of a summer thunderstorm over the biting rain you get occasionally in the late fall.
The lightning came smashing through and the whole place went blinding white for half-seconds at a time. And here is another nice thing about a summer thunderstorm — you can track it by the sound of it. When there’s no space between the lightning and the boom of its thunder, you imagine the storm is right on top of you. Some black mass moving over the earth, raking the whole place clean. And, admittedly, that’s not so romantic.
But there’s something undeniably romantic — or maybe the word I’m looking for is etherial or tragic-lush — about a summer thunderstorm.1 It’s no wonder that when the Greeks invented Zeus, they gave him domain over the thunderstorms. There’s no “natural disaster” as common and wild a thunderstorm, they had to explain these phenomena somehow. In the summer on the Eastern Shore, we get them about three afternoons a week. We know they’re just charged energy in the clouds2 but imagine being an Ancient Greek, having just slept with somebody you shouldn’t have and then you walk outside, feeling very sly about yourself until you look up at the sky and see it darkening. And then lightning starts leaping all over the place, chasing you home. What natural conclusion could you draw other than that some divine being in the clouds is pissed-off at your recent sins?
We’ve come a long way from Ancient Greece and while we’ve harnessed the power of the atom (thanks Robert Oppenheimer), we haven’t ever been able to capture a lightning bolt. It turns out that it wouldn’t be all that feasible to capture the energy of a lightning bolt, but it does seem like the sort of thing humans would do if we weren’t so busy inventing ways to kill each other.
One reason in wouldn’t be feasible to capture lightning bolts is that they don’t spend a lot of time sticking around. A summer thunderstorm rarely lasts more than three-quarters of an hour and I suppose this thunderstorm — the one I’m using for this piece — probably lasted about that long. It left the parking lot flooded and the agitation in the store turned to annoyance when people realized they’d have to slush through rainwater to get to their cars. But again, I wasn’t too bothered. I was wearing flip-flops and it’s not so bad to feel warm, fresh rainwater on your bare feet.
There were still a few hours of sunlight left when I got home and the air was thick with the golden-dew haze that fills it after a thunderstorm. And I was right about the sunset. It came into the sky in brilliant pink and yellow. And spots of amber sunlight shot through the trees and lay sparkling over the wet grass. And everything smelled like the rain on the grass, drying in the sunshine. A summer-afternoon thunderstorm is always followed by a beautiful sunset. And you could easily make a metaphor out of that. But I prefer to leave it be.
P.S. have you ever seen what a lightning storm looks like from space? It’s, just … wow.
If you’re writing something or making a movie, a summer thunderstorm is an easy way to pace your piece. Particularly if you want two characters to fuck and you’ve built the sexual tension into a chasm between them. Turgenev did it in a novella called Torrents of Spring. And — I hate that I’m writing this — Nicholas Sparks did it in The Notebook.
A thunderstorm is formed when hot and cold air collide. It’s kind of wild that all that’s happening above us — that there’s an ocean of air currents flowing this way and that. It’s all invisible, but it’s up there. That’s kind of what turbulence is. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself when I’m in a plane that’s shaking with turbulence. It’s just air currents flowing through the atmospherical ocean.