A year ago The Raven and I watched the storm.
We had come up from the river, the day’s ferocious heat still seared into our skins. A hundred fifteen in Bullhead City, and we’d staggered against it, even the sidewalks beneath our feet shimmering wildly. Sunset brought a little relief, and we drove up into the mountains to the west, past improbable spires desert wind had carved into granite.
We’d walked among those spires some hours earlier tracing a little canyon full of petroglyphs, watching bats chase dragonflies in the shade of the rock walls. One bat flew up to us where we sat, observed us carefully, then arced away to flit among those spires.
In the dark the spires were ominous, lit by flashes of lightning to the east.
We drove that car farther west into the mountains, 50 miles or so and climbing nearly the whole time, and the scope of the storm behind us became plain. It was massive. A wall of cloud stretching a hundred fifty miles across Arizona, easily that far to our east, and the air so clear, so uninterrupted by artificial light, that each flash of lightning spoke itself out plain against the night.
I pulled off the pavement in Nevada, took a dirt road through a Joshua tree forest I knew. Two thousand feet above the river, the temperature had dropped down comfortably into the double digits. The rental was a convertible, a Mustang, and we put the top down, arranged ourselves in the back seat. We faced east and watched the storm. What damage its unimaginable heat-stoked violence was doing to the landscape we dared not imagine.
A few weeks earlier I had awoken at 40,000 feet at two am, looked down at a monstrous storm that spanned the breadth of a continent. Its front was sharp and tall, reaching perhaps half the way from the ground to my seatback tray. The storm had killed already: I’d watched the news in the airport terminal. Black tornados came out of the night sky, flicking out lives as i might snuff a candle with wet fingers. It was an odd remove I felt, an Olympian perch and the foreknowledge that the storm mantled a greater storm of grief below it.
In the months since I had done my share of time looking at my life from 40,000 feet.
Half a century gone, nearly, and so little learned. Confusing contentment for happiness. Mistaking attention for love. That killer storm was just the first in a barrage. The next weeks I watched roads wash out before the storms’ fury, not all of them metaphorical. I landed in the desert a wreck, stormwrack, tossed up against the unforgiving rocks and stunned and bleeding.
Fitting that The Raven found me there.
Another month passed and we sat among the Joshua trees facing east, watching another wall of storm. From the North Rim to Prescott it stood before us, glowering. A hundred blots of lightning a minute flared within the cloud across the length of Arizona, the thunder dying out long before it reached our ears. The silhouettes of Joshua trees all around us, the tiny desert hamlet of Searchlight laid out prettily before us ten miles downhill, the Milky Way just barely washed out by a moon a day past full, and my heart near bursting.
I wrote the next morning:
This night sufficient recompense for a dozen of my lives, to sit here motionless content beneath the lurid moon, the certain violence of night flash floods diffused by miles into a spectacle of flashing light, The Raven dozing, head on my shoulder.
There is a creek called Havasu that flows into the Grand Canyon from the south, a pretty stream on the Havasupai Reservation dotted with steep falls and plunge pools the color of lapis lazuli. A year ago this week eight inches of rain fell in its watershed. The flash flood came. Small dams burst. Homes were swept into the flood, destroyed. Hikers, rafters, and some of the natives had to be pulled off ledges by helicopter. And then the flood slackened. The sun came out. The creek had jumped its banks, scoured out its plunge pools, left some falls dry, created new ones even more grand. A year on people say the valley is better for the storm.
Storms. The farm sold this week. Everyone has been asking if I’m sorry to be leaving after thirty-one years in this place. Yesterday, a powerful storm front passed through. The winds broke apart my favourite sugar maple - the one outside my bedroom window. The chainsaw is already packed away in the storage locker, so I used my bow saw to cut it apart. This morning, as I worked for a couple of hours, I thought of how this is precisely the right time to leave.
Love the Dylan reference. Hopefully that doesn’t come across as faint praise, it’s not meant that way.