Storms

Yesterday a huge storm blew through. I always thought I loved storms, but moving here has made me reconsider this position. Whether it's their sheer magnitude or merely sitting through one under a roof made of grass, something about the experience in this place has introduced an unease that, until now, was only the stuff of children's stories and patronized friends in my life. I had initially pulled a chair out onto the porch to watch the show, but within fifteen minutes, water was swirling an inch deep under my chair as rain washed horizontally through the door. Marbles sized hailstones (hailstones?!) were clattering off of the tin roof of the kitchen and wind was bowing saplings over to touch the ground. For a few minutes I looked like a character at the climax of a sappy Disney family adventure movie as I ran through the lightning flashes to get a shell-shocked baby dikdik out of the bushes and to haul her and several of our trunks of books and tools off of the porch and into the relative dryness of the hut. (It hit so quickly that Bryan was stuck in another hut further away.) It reminded me of the first night we were here, when a similar storm hit. I was so shocked by the intensity of that one that I messed around with trying to describe it the next day, just for my own amusement. You can never describe something like that, but this is a little what it felt like to me:

When our plane landed on the dirt airstrip outside of this town, the sky was wide and blindingly blue. The rocky green hills arched like cats under the empty sky, stretching taller than usual, enjoying the extra room. But last night was very different. Like the friend that forgot to come to the airport but tried to make up for it with an embarrassingly over-the-top surprise party, the storm rolled in with flashy extravagance. I was too tired to hear the rumbling whispers behind the door or to catch a glimpse of the "welcome home" banner briefly lighting up horizon. I was a good guest of honor in this regard. I didn't have to fake my surprise. It was the white brilliance of shattering stars burning through my closed eyelids that first jerked me roughly out of a dream. In the eternal heartbeat when everything becomes suddenly visible, the geckos on the mud walls and I shared a frozen wide-eyed gaze, like we were surprised to see each other, (though we weren't). But when the darkness had descended again, what fully woke me was the pain in my ribs as crumbling pieces of night sky plummeted to the earth and exploded into the muddy ground outside the hut. My senses ached with each new proof that they were inadequate to soak up the storm. Like dish-towels being used to mop up the ocean, my eyes and ears were drenched through and through yet the wet world outside was more full than I could feel. It was the first time in a very long time that I could remember being scared of a thunderstorm. It went on like this for the better part of an hour. From under the mosquito net I calculated distances to the laptop and the bag with our passports and shot records, trying to decide which one to grab when the roof was either torn off by the wind or burned off by the lighting. But eventually she wore herself out and stumbled slowly away to wherever storms go to sleep off their hangovers. In the morning, leaves were strewn about like green confetti. I almost expected to find shards of starlight still in the puddles.