Lightning

[poliphilo]

The window goes white. I listen and listen and finally the thunder happens- like someone muttering and chewing at the same time. Not close. But the lightning was so bright. They say you should turn your computer off when there's thunder around.

The way I picture it the electicity comes surging up the cables, gathers in the monitor, then leaps out at your face.

I was in a car once sitting on a hill top watching a thunderstorm come up the valley towards us. "We're safe," said my wife. "The tyres will earth us." The lightning came nearer and nearer.

It's odd but I don't remember any climax. Just the storm coming, not its passing over. Maybe we were hit after all and I'm writing this in some sort of an afterlife. No, that's silly.

That wife (the first one) had a cousin whose husband and child were killed by lightning. They were out swimming in the lake and the storm snuck up without them noticing it and...... my wife's cousin wasn't there on the beach; the news had to be delivered to her. (Picture the sherrif driving up. His walk to the door.) Afterwards people were always muttering about her just out of her hearing.

I turn off the computer. It takes so long to close. As it goes through its procedure I feel like we're running ahead of the storm. Only not running- dawdling. Your settings are being saved. Yes, yes- come on!

Blue screen.

Blue screen

Blue screen

Black.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Of course!

Remember this one in April?



As I recall, this was taken in mid-morning.

How I love these dark moments when everything waits, and then the storm comes!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed I do.

The world outside looks like age-blackened Victorian wallpaper.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

:)

I liked your comment on my April posting of this photograph:

My God! It looks like the end of the world!

And so it does. Bliss!

(In my wonderful book, The Elements Rage, there's an account of "the tremendous tornado which struck Irving, Kansas, on May 30, 1879:

"There appeared in the west a cloud of inky blackness and enormous dimensions. It presented a square front of blackness almost two miles wide, with the front almost perpendicular. Many people actually believed that Judgment Day had come and offered up fervent prayers and loud appeals for preservation.

With a roar 'like that of a thousand cannons,' the cloud coverd the little town. In an instant everything was swept from the earth in ruin, and death was experienced in its most dreadful forms.

Persons who lived through the storm to tell the tale said the air was filled with fumes like sulphorous smoke, the sky had a reddish tinge bordering on purple, and the ground was rocked as if by an earthquake. What seemed to them vast waterspouts reached the ground in several places, swinging to and fro in the gale like elephants' trunks, seizing and taking up into the whirling vortexes everything that stood in their way."

Below is an observation from the US Weather Bureau about lightning playing about a tornado funnel:

"From the sides of the boiling, dust-laden cloud a fiery stream poured out like water through a sieve, breaking into spheres of irregular shape as they descended."

One of the most impressive displays of lightning was seen at the time of the great St. Louis, Missouri, tornado of May 27, 1896. A Weather Bureau official reported:

"The elctrical display during the storm was of exceeding brilliancy. It was first observed at 5:00 PM, an hour before the tornado occurred. This continued with short intermissions until 5:45 PM, when it became almost continuous and extended more into the west and north. At 6:00 PM, when the tornado occurred, the whole west and northwest sky was in a continuous blaze of light. Intensely vivid flashes of forked lightning were frequent, being outlined in green, blue, purple, and bright yellow colors against the dull yellow background of the never ceasing sheet lightning."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Hell, but those weather bureau boys could write!

I wonder if their present day counterparts would come with anything as powerful and poetic?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The Weather Bureau accounts contain the same atmosphere as Blackwood or Stoker. One wonders if their poetic writing was influenced, or if the Bureau only hired literature majors.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess anyone who went through college in those days would have studied latin (and possibly greek) and so would have had a thorough grounding in the mechanics of literature.