After posting around the issue of water conservation yesterday, I think it's appropriate to acknowledge that last night we had our first desert storm of the season here in Tucson. The monsoon season hasn't "officially" started here in Tucson--because I believe you need to have three days in a row with the dew point at a certain level for that to be the case (and the local weather guys haven't gone all meteorological on us yet with those definitions, so I'm sure we haven't hit it yet. But hey, you have to give them what little weather reporting they get out here. How many times can you say "sunny and hot today" without getting bored???), but if you want to know more about the North American Monsoons (which are very different from the monsoons my friend the world traveller will be experiencing whilst in the Peace Corps in the Phillippines), you can check out this handy wikipedia entry. Oh, and I linked the above photo to the photographer's website, because he has some gorgeous pictures of last year's monsoon season on it.
Okay, so now that the weather lesson is over with...
I love desert thunderstorms. Last night's didn't feature a lot of rain, and had enough lightning in it that brush fires are an issue throughout Southern Arizona, which is always a concern, but it was soft and wild and beautiful. Desert thunderstorms always make me feel a little bit more alive.
You notice I qualify that--it's the desert ones that I love so. As I was telling my friend Dr. Wutang just a bit ago (she gave me her sister's term for monsoons, which I borrowed to title this entry), you mix a thunderstorm and large trees, and I still get a little squeamy.
When I was maybe six or so, and still living in the wilds of Maine, we used to spend a fair amount of our summers hanging out at my mom's cousin's camp on Ossippee Lake (the one in Waterboro, Maine--not the one in New Hampshire. And actually, "mom's cousin" is actually my grandfather's cousin--but I digress). The camp was called Cedarlog, and we'd swim there all the time. Cedarlog is one of the reasons I never went to summer camp as a kid--never had to, as all the necessities were right there.
Anyway, storms could come up pretty quickly in the afternoons, and we all had our duties when the wind picked up and the thunder started growling. We'd pull all the lawn chairs up to the house, secure everything--and then the whole gang would hang out on the screened in porch and watch the storm race over the lake. It was usually quite a fun event, and very multi-generational.
However, this one storm came up particularly swiftly, and as we all gathered on the porch to watch, my mother noticed a life jacket that had not been secured, and that was now floating in the water right next to the dock. New Englanders are known to be thrifty folk, and it just wouldn't be sensible (in my mother's view) to risk losing a lifejacket in the storm. So she popped off the porch, ran down to the waters edge and, leaning on a convenient century old pine tree, plucked the preserver out of the water.
The next moment, I have no image for--it is entirely a sound memory. The next moment, I heard to sharp sounds: one the slapping of the porch door as it closed behind my mother, and the other the sound of the clash lightning and wood. Nearly everyone on the porch was thrown to the ground. When we gathered ourselves off the floor, we had an entirely different view of the world: the pine tree that my mother had leaned on simply wasn't there anymore. There was a stump about three feet high--and that's pretty much it. Luckily, the debris had mostly headed for the water; if the lightning had hit in a way to make the tree fall landward, it most likely would've taken out the porch.
So give me a great lightning show over a vast expanse of sky, and I'm a happy girl. But stick me in a forest with that kind of thunderclap that you feel more than hear, and...well...be prepared for sightings of my inner six-year-old.
Okay, this one is long enough....Cheers.
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