photo by Jane Bell Goldstein
Severe Summer Storm
by Richard Simmonds
I.
The storm was already roilng miles away when the bus came to pick me up for day camp. I must have been six or seven. For lunch we ate in a screened-in room, full of tables and benches, sixty of us boys, nine counselors. College students. Some older because they had been in The War. Because of the storm we spent the morning in the porch making baskets by gluing popsicle sticks into a pattern. Four or five older boys had their heads together over a chessboard at one end of our table. When it was time for lunch we put away our crafts and games set the tables, brought out our food-- soup and sandwiches. Now it was raining hard. The lightning and thunder answered each other more quickly. Our counselor had just come home from The War. He’d been in the North African theater, a pilot, and was going to college in the fall. When his mood was right and we’d pestered him enough, he would tell us about the missions he’d been on, bombing Nazi positions. We were in the palm of his hand. He told us about his plane, a P-47 Thunderbolt. We could have built one. He’d told us about it in such detail. As he talked the storm grew more severe. The wind picked up and blew through the room. The rain heavier, we had to lower the canvas shades and batten them down in order to keep dry. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed even more closely. He said that meant the storm’s center was coming near. Then lightning struck a huge oak tree right outside a corner of our lunch room, so close to the corner that it seemed to support that side of the porch. Seconds later, after the blinding light and the deafening boom, screaming, the tree shattered breaking up into thousands of splinters. When we finally looked at him, Jack, our counselor, had his head in his arms on the table and was sobbing. When the lightning struck, something within him cracked. What had held him together snapped. We gathered around him, hugging him, holding him, but as young boys, we had no idea what had hurt him so. |
II.
Later that same summer with my grandmother at her summer cottage blocks away from Lake Erie, another severe storm came in from the north. My grandmother was a kid at heart, eager for adventure. We drove in her Packard as close as we could get to the lake. The slightest wind puts Lake Erie in a churn. So the waves were high, the wind strong. The thunder’s loud cracks and the lightning flashes spelled each other closer and closer. We rushed back to the safety of the cottage to listen and watch the storm. The next morning early we walked down to the lake. During the night the storm had spent itself or moved on. A rubber dingy had washed up on the shore. —three people dead in it. Killed by lightning. I remember clearly all of their hair was white. We talked about it, and I told her about the oak tree splittering and Jack crying. When we got back to the cottage and were eating breakfast, she stopped, put her fork down and pushed her plate away. “You must put these things away till you are older. They are too heavy for you now.” Tears in her eyes. I figured she was talking to herself as well as me. |