Perfect Storms

        A few years ago, camping at Ruby Lake (11,121 feet) in the John Muir Wilderness Area, I awoke in the night to intense, bright flashes of lightning, flung from the hovering clouds with all the force of Zeus's vengeful arm. Thunder, like the heavens' loudest timpani, matched audially the blinding lightning, crashing over the tent without a pause between flash and crash. Fists of wind and rain pounded the tent. I cringed in my sleeping bag. I screamed. My hiking partner threw an arm over me: "Here! Creep, wretch, under a comfort/serves in a whirlwind."

        Then I heard a sound I had never heard before nor have heard since, a rushing, terrifying roar, growing louder with the Doppler effect until it was over the tent and I knew what it was: hail pounding across the lake with the force of elephants. Hail battered the tent, then gave way to a torrential downpour of rain that battered it just as hard. 

        The next morning I crawled shakily from the tent, which still had water on the floor. It had been an unusually severe storm. In Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm, I learned that scientists define a "perfect" storm as a rare tempest caused by an unusual combination of meteorological phenomena. I don't know if meteorologists would tell me that the storm I experienced at Ruby Lake fell into that category, but to me, cowering in my tent on a bluff above the lake, it was certainly an unprecedented, powerful combination of meteorological phenomena. 

        But I wouldn't call it a "perfect" storm. It was much too frightening. I would call a perfect storm the sort that swept around my own house last night. 

        The lightning was the goddess-glow, not the Thor-and-Zeus kind, and the thunder was distant and playful, following the lightning as an afterthought. Because the lightning was so far away, there was no fear of fire, especially when the clouds kindly dropped a brief light rain that dampened the earth. Even if lightning did strike a match to a tree, it would find the kindling around that tree too wet to start a fire. The wind was merely zephyrous, not the rip-roaring, branch-strewing kind. After the sultry sulk of humidity released its bad humor with the fall of rain, the clouds closed in over the light, but the sun shone behind their blackness, light and dark playing tag, and then suddenly I looked up, and the air was entirely orange, a dense tangerine color that saturated vision. As quickly as it had come, it fell into disuse; the air returned to normal dark-storm color, and the rain poured down. I ran to close the windows, but the rain was falling so straight I left them open. The fresh taste of rain hung in the air inside the house.

        It was a lovely storm, full of sensual pleasures. It watered the earth and cleared the air of its humid sulk. It started no fires and caused no damage. It instigated no fear. It was a perfect storm.