Did you hear the rumbles last night? We were up at four to stumble onto the porch and watch the lightening show. There were forkless sheets, noiseless ruptures, and then a single horizontal bolt over the hills where the osprey sleeps. For a while there were silent explosions of light, and we thought about being on a planet with no atmosphere so that there could be no thunder. Later it got more noisy, so you could count the distance between the lightening and thunder and know that it was getting closer. This morning the dragon is still growling in his sleep and the weather has changed from dry to damp.
In the sierras where we camp there is a particular mountain that makes thunder. I can’t describe it any other way. In the morning there is a clear cloudless sky, reflected in a brilliant jewel lake, and by 12:30 high fluffy clouds form in the east, and by 1:30 it has started to storm. Lightening crashes into the line of already battered trees, and if we are hiking we hightail it back down the mountain. Usually a brief, fierce shaking storm that marches from east to west and then is completely finished, with a clean fresh smell and a sudden explosion of bird song. The evening is crystal clear until tomorrow. When the mountain makes thunder again.
I have always liked thunder storms although here in California we are lightening-deprived. I never knew how deprived until I visited my Florida friend and saw what REAL lightening looks like: long clean forks that come from every part of the sky and explode onto the horizon burning an afterimage on your retinae. I could have sat and watched that new and improved lightening forever, but Florida people have more reason to be frightened by it than we do and I was always ushered inside when the bolts got closer. Once I was lucky enough to sit on a screened porch in San Marcos Island and see a fork of lighting that was thicker than a telephone pole. I would have stayed with wide Disney eyes until my hair went from curly to crispy but I was anxiously tugged back inside.
I couldn’t say what beavers think about thunder, if they notice it at all. With all our trains and trucks and traffic noises I can’t imagine thunder sounds very different to them, and I doubt they look for the forks. It’s one of the things I like best about them actually; their cheerful ability to go about their business regardless of what life throws at them. We should all be so lucky.
