Donner and Blitzen
It’s stormy. For weeks it’s been getting hotter, and yet there’s been no sight of relief, of a break, of rain. Everything has become parched.
For the last two afternoons, spectacular wild-horse storms have come racing towards us over the mountains. We can watch them coming for hours, the distant thunderheads thrashing with lightning, growling at the edge of hearing.
I spent the weekend on a friend’s ‘farm’ (some troublesome goats - RIP, two enormously fat pigs - destined for the slaughterhouse as of yesterday, three short and stocky ponies, still alive, some elusive ducks, two dogs and a cat). We spent a quiet Sunday sitting in a breeze that was soft with coming rain, sanding down a couple of pine tables. The sweet, intoxicating fragrance of pine mixed with linseed oil and the ozone tang of the distant storm.
I was about to have my armies invade Afghanistan in daring attempt to take over Asia* when we remembered that the tables were in trouble. We went outside to bring them in and watched the rain advancing. I stood, exhilarated, the lightning whip-cracking into the earth, until fat drops began to gust into me, harried by the rising wind. As we ran inside, hailstones the size of peas sent puffs of dust up from the still-dry ground.
When the deluge was finally over I stood open-mouthed as a rainbow grew out of the golden-lit hills behind the farm, and arched over the pinkening sky. I wish I could describe it. The sunset on the retreating storm clouds is beyond words – so I took a photo. Actually, I took about ten, but here are the best ones.
Then, yesterday, the weather surpassed itself, a cavalry in pursuit of Sunday’s lone horseman. It crowded in from all sides, wrist-thick splits of lightning jagging across the bruising sky, plunging into the ground in all directions with a noise like the earth cracking apart. And then it started to hail.
The two of us sat in a bar in Maerua Mall, listening to the sky crash down around our ears, barely able to hear ourselves think. Hailstones piled up in foamy drifts, swirling around the gutters, like stray suds gathering around plugholes. The floor was awash. They were sweeping rivers out of the pizza restaurant where we had dinner. Everywhere you looked, people were running, trying to dodge the wall of rain. It was phenomenal.
I’m a bit worried about cycling in it though, which is fine, because currently the valve from my front tyre is attached, as if fused by some terrible external pressure, to the valve of my bike pump. They’re like copulating dogs, except you can’t separate them by throwing water on them.
*Risk. What a great game. If you’re winning. It reminded me of the monopoly games I used to play with my family when I was younger. I can remember that same uncontrollable urge to heft the board and all the pieces in the air, and then run about laughing maniacally in a rain of paper money and Community Chest cards as if it were yesterday.