The Storm Watchers
A recent late night Manhattan thunderstorm sent my mind whirling back to Southern Illinois. It was a particularly vicious storm, one that woke me out of a deep sleep and sent my dog burrowing further under the covers until she was sandwiched between my feet.
Thunderstorms don’t really have much resonance in New York. In a city where people are supposedly being knifed in the back or mugged and maimed like clockwork, a little lightning goes completely unnoticed. The citizens of Manhattan are too busy smoking their cigarettes or writing their novels to spend time counting the seconds between a flash of light and the soon to follow rumble. After all, we’re grown-ups here, for God’s sake.
But a storm is a totally different thing in Southern Illinois. You don’t live in an apartment where you’re seventeen stories from the roof of the building. If there’s a sudden explosion of hail, you’re bound to hear it stomping out a rhythm on your shingles. A storm isn’t something that life can upstage. It’s something that leaves you vulnerable. It happens all around you. It’s an event.
I don’t remember how young I was at the time, but I remember the hysterical voices of the television weathermen and women. I remember the sound of the wind whistling through the hallways and the general panic in the air. A storm was coming!
Even though our neighbors were miles away, I could almost hear them as they nailed down their loose shutters and called for their children to run inside and “for Christ’s sake grab the cat on your way in!”
I could almost see them as they ran down into their cellars and basements and quickly counted the rows of canned goods and organized little congregations of double AA batteries. The world was panicking and if you looked into the clouds you could see why. It was just before dusk and the sky had a strange aluminum color to it. There was no sun or moon or stars, only a dimly growing canopy that seemed to hide thunderbolts and twisters and the face of an angry God.
Dogs had stopped barking.
The wind was busy hurling leaves into the air and banging gates off in the distance.
In the middle of all of this was my father.
I saw him hurry down to the basement and I assumed he was like the rest of the world. He was going to check on the provisions. He was going to make sure that we had enough to eat while we cowered between the cement walls of the cellar.
But I was wrong.
He wasn’t like the rest of the world.
He wasn’t running wildly through the house, counting his children and taping down loose objects. Instead, he reappeared from the basement with a handful of folding lawn chairs. I remember wondering how plastic lawn furniture was going to save us from certain doom, so I asked what exactly he was planning to do with them.
“We’re gonna watch the storm!”
The house whistled and trembled in response.
I stood there baffled, wondering if he’d gone completely insane. Didn’t he see what everyone else was doing? Didn’t he understand the basic laws of nature? If your world is going to collapse around you, you don’t just sit by and watch it from a lawn chair. You gather your children and your pets and some sensible reading material and close yourself up in the safest spot you can find and pray until you’re hoarse. You don’t treat the promise of cataclysmic disaster like it’s free entertainment.
Unless you’re Dad.
He erected his viewing area on the front stoop. Two chairs. I don’t remember where the rest of the family was, but it was only the two of us at the time. He sat down, eyes wild with excitement as the clouds grew darker and the first flash of light lit up the night sky.
I left my chair empty, opting to walk back and forth in the foyer, too afraid to set foot anywhere near the approaching doom. As I paced, Dad would occasionally shout out things to me like, “You’re gonna miss it, Chad!” or “Did you see that lightning? You could see all the way over to the Fortmeyers!”
An amazing thing occurred to me that night as I finally mustered up the courage to tiptoe outside and take my place by my father. He understood that you couldn’t run from a storm. That you had to face it and embrace it for everything it might or might not deliver to you. Of course he knew we were most likely safe where we were and I’m sure that he would have scooped me up in his arms and rushed us both inside had the lightning come close enough to do any real damage.
And so we sat there, our hair being lifted and ruffled by the wind, watching as the sky turned into a movie screen. If flickered with shadows and light. Suddenly my father’s enthusiasm crept over me and we both began cheering with each thunder crash. My fear evaporated or at least had been reduced to a minor rumble in the back of my brain. And when the clouds finally baptized us with an unexpected deluge of rain, we laughed and clapped some more.
All of this came back to me when the thunder woke me in my New York apartment hundreds of miles away from Southern Illinois and my father. But I realized how this lesson affected my life. I was a writer, a profession that has no stability or promise of reward. There were questions that sometimes kept me awake more than the worst thunder.
Where will I be in ten years?
Will I wake up when I’m forty and realize that I’ve made a terrible mistake and should have simply chosen a career with some security and dental insurance and a 401K?
But then I remembered that night of storm watching with Dad and a strange calm comes over me. Almost the same kind of wild excitement fills my eyes and I allow myself to breathe deeply and fall back asleep. The lesson I learned the night of the storm was a simple one: If you faced the world with a little faith, if you were willing to take a few risks, the world would put on one hell of a show.