All Things Considered - Thunderstorm

Thunderstorm

I've driven up from sweltering Jackson, Mississippi, and swung across Tennessee into the gentle warmth of a Kentucky evening; the grass full and seeding; grazing, lazing cattle - some like Welsh Blacks - and fine horses in a gently rolling countryside that makes me homesick for England. Dusk falls as I near the Ohio border, and to the north-west, an ugly accumulationof heavy cloud flashes like a faulty strip light, heading across country to cut me off.

I pass Cincinnati and it gains ground. On the radio I catch the end of a storm warning for Butler and Warren counties, and as I head north on 71, I am hypnotised by its lumbering, psychotic approach. Turning off the freeway, I cross a quarter mile north-west towards it, pull into a strip mall parking lot, kill the engine and get out to watch.

It heaves its mass closer, anonymous and silent flashings like some gigantic television behind the closed curtains of banked clouds, illuminating them, flooding from south to north and overflowing the last in line, tendrils of pure, incandescent energy flooding out around it, fingering its fecund outlines like a hungry lover. There is still no sound, but the wind builds ominously.

It gets closer, and noiseless shrieks and gashes of electricity rip throughthe curtains and flood across the sky, then suddenly the jagged lasers fill a cloud to overflowing and it explodes in all directions. The chaos builds, no longer just south to north, but reaching out in both directions.

Great stifled splatters of light like vast anti red-eye pre-flashes close up pupils dilated by the dark; tiny demons rush out of cover, flickering after escaping souls to drag them back to hell. I lean on the open car door to watch, my radar detector emits its nothing-doing-closing-down warning. Itmakes me jump.

Some of these ghouls are overhead now, and I can hear distant rumblings. The storm is advancing in a broad semi-circle like heavy armour relentlessly taking over a battlefield.

A wailing, honking pack of fire-engines and police cars scrambles up the roadbehind me, their lights diminished by the grandeur overhead - it looks as if the ungodly will be comprehensively smitten tonight, at least one sinner has punched nine one one.

Now the big demons are loosed, they snake over my head in a vicious, burning stream. Livid tongues of reckless violence answer back from other clouds, and the hanging signs and flag ropes around the strip mall start to rattle just as they do in the films right before half the supporting cast and atleast two good guys get wiped out.

A big demon leaps out and rushes around behind me; opposite the end of his run, a neon banshee grimaces, manic and silent, then bursts. The young guy closing up the sandwich shop comes out to take a look. His dad just rang to tell him about a tornado warning for right here. The wind hears him, andtoughens up. A cloud spits malevolence in several directions.

The demons are skittering around the skies everywhere now, one shatters and falls to my left.

It's time I was more circumspect about this. Standing in the open, mouth agape, awe-struck at this elemental beauty, is not a good idea. It might be time I hid under something. I reassure myself that so far, the tornado seems to be off, and the lightning hasn't come near me. Immediately, a thick, wriggling stream of electricity pours down to the ground from a cloud that isheaded straight at me. Then another, around the back of the sandwich shop; millions of volts flooding down like molten iron poured out of a Bessemer converter.

I move as the first rain spots arrive on the wind, and the lower layer of cloud immediately overhead streams across the sky, momentarily frozen by the flashes from the stacked cumulus. I start the car and drive to a gas station to pick up coffee and cookies. Lights are going out in the neighbourhood as I stir my creamer in and pay, and I see two wet, pasty-faced policemen coming in. The garage attendant looks worried, and excited - a good drama will at least liven up a deadly boring job. Other cars are sheltering here, the storm is now directly over us. As I go to my car, the two biggest bangs I ever heard shatter perception, and rivers of electricitypour out of the sky all around. I wonder what happens to petrol if it gets a direct hit, and how many thousand gallons I am on top of.

Sirens are going off in the distance as electronic security systems collapse into hysteria, and the rain arrives like a very bad mistake at the Hoover Dam. The sky behind it alternates between black and vivid lilac.

As my coffee cools, the rain slackens, and I nose the Bonneville cautiously back onto the freeway.

Way ahead on the road, two massive, parallel lightning bolts hit the ground.

Perhaps they're a hint.

Closer now - too close, a deadly stream of white hot malice spills out of some other dimension and fills the freeway with blinding light. It says, unequivocally, "Go no further". In the following flashes I can see enough to make out a rest area sign.

I creep in among the trucks and cars, and in spite of the mayhem above, the day's drive starts to weight my eyelids. If I am going to die here, I need a nap first. In go the ear-plugs, on goes the eye-shade, back goes the driving seat, and as the storm lurches east, I doze off.

Five hours and a stiff neck later, the morning is fresh, green and bright. A silver jet trail glistens across the clearing sky like a knife wound revealed by a lifted shirt. Birds riot in a bush behind me, and the Warren County React Team hands out coffee to bleary-eyed truckers.

Up the road, dense white mist hugs the meandering path of the Little Miami River, and an Ohio cop lurks in the long grass pointing a radar gun at me.