August at Red Willow.
This time is many things, some centered around human activity, others purely elemental. The monsoon season is full swing, but that word seems inadequate to describe it: the raining season, the thundering season, the storming season — all seem more accurate descriptors, and yet none covers the full force of it.
This is not a place of slow, steady, constant rains, but a space of sudden storms.
It’s perhaps as true of life generally as of the tangible world. We have worked to weather our own sudden storms over the last week and more. Sometimes the storms seem more constant than sudden, even if the form they take is unexpected; lately life seems to present an endless array of obstacles, an unending barrage of metaphorical rain and hail and howling winds. We’ve gotten plenty of literal hail lately, too, most recently in the storm that unleashed its sudden fury upon us this afternoon.
The image above is not from today, although a couple of weeks ago, we had jut such a storm here. The day begins brilliantly sunny and almost unbearably hot; the clouds build up around the horizon on all sides, then move in suddenly to merge overhead. Their thundering song begins low and distant, drums awaiting lightning dancers. When the sky turns the color of heavy metals, pewter, lead, iron, it’s time to take cover; there will be only moments in which to do so.
And then the temperature drops a cool twenty degrees or more, the wind rises, and the heavens open. On a good day, the clouds will release only heavy rain, heavy not merely by volume but by the size and weight of the individual drops. On less good days, the mercury continues to fall, rain turns to ice, and hail batters the land, eventually collecting upon the surface of the small rivers that carve their way through the earth’s newly-muddy surface, this ancient land’s geologic history in microcosm.
When it is once again safe to emerge, the air is cold, with a razor’s edge. At a glance, the low-lying areas appear covered with snow, but it’s only ice — tiny hailstones fallen so fast, as though driven downward like a thousand million tiny arrows shot from a cosmic bow, that the earth cannot hold them and the wind cannot take them, and so they pool upon the ground in small frozen banks.
Winter in summer. Ice in the rain. Thunder even when the sun shines.
Rain nurtures; rain renews life. Rain also kills. Every year, somewhere in the state, at least a couple of people get swept away in these seasonal storms. Hail? Hail punches holes in once-solid surfaces, breaching their boundaries with all the force of a cosmic jackhammer. And the winds? The winds rip the world apart.
In this place, the storm gives — and it takes. It builds . . . and destroys. It births new life, even as it demands death as its price.
The key is knowing, in that moment when the storm is imminent, when to take cover . . . and recognizing when it is safe to emerge, once again, into the light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
