Wheel! Of! FISH!

A Breath of Storm

2002-04-17 - 11:05 p.m.

I love my tropical paradise.

I love the thick syrupy golden sunlight that gets palpably warmer as the weeks roll by until by late May you can reach out and press your hands against the hot, still air, like pushing on warm glass.

I love the strange shapes the clouds take, the tall pirate ships and zephyric Zeppelins and ethereal duckies that cruise the thermals ... and the way the sun, with its last daily gasps, reaches out with its magnificent arms and rends the clouds into strange Bosch shapes and eerie Dali phantoms splayed across a sky done in a palette of colors no oils mixed by the hand of man could hope to match.

I love walking through a field of hot grass at the height of the afternoon and seeing lazy bees curling around the clumps of greedy flowers that spring up in the daze, the droning wasps buzzing by arrogantly at eye level, the grasshoppers leaping frantically out of my path as I trod through the crackling greens like a latter-day Gojira.

I love how the sun rushes up and throttles the unsuspecting night during the summer months, and how the moon rides low and yellow, peering over her shoulder, always wondering when that big bullish Sol is going to come hurtling at her over the horizon.

The best thing about the long overarching summer of south Florida are the storms.

I was raised with these storms, and for the last couple of years I've felt ill at ease looking at the horizon in the summer twilight and seeing only a thin blue line of dark clouds meandering their way west.

Ah, but tonight, we had the first note of a real summer symphony.

CRASH the thundering tympani!

FLASH the lightning cymbals!

And what symbols are in the heart of the storm? More than you'd care to count, bucko. We've been counting them since we first crouched under the trees to get out of the way and the first lucky star we thanked was the one that was shining when the lightning struck the tree rather than us.

The storms of summer roll like a dark carpet, hovering like a swarm of forgotten creatures over the horizon and blotting out all the light on that side of the sky. I used to sit out on the pavement and smell the strange, heavy, crackling air that was pushed before a really furious storm and watch the darkness creep close and blot out the light.

"The NOTHING."

Nothing doing. There's a HELL of a lot of something in a proper storm. The thunder shakes the feeble walls we've tossed up and the rain drowns all of our creations and pounds our edifices into mud and makes lakes of our highways and dead whales of our cars.

My street used to flood sometimes. Once I sat in a raft and rode the current down around the cul-de-sac and back down the street until I was caught in the massive sucking maelstrom over the storm drain. Four feet of spiralling howling demon wind pulling the water into a crazed eye, and a wee little mariner like myself knew the barest hint of what it's like to be at the mercy of the water.

Then I got out of the boat and laughed as my little feet clogged the grating at the eye of the whirlpool and caused a big gloop of irritated air to gurgle up out of the thwarted Charybdis.

The fury of the storms was wonderful, because it cleaned the land and made everything smell wonderful and you could sit out in the drumming cool rain and watch the most beautiful pyrotechnics ever envisioned.

Mad dreams go crackling across the sky and spawn new howling progeny that roar into the ground and shoot back upwards. The tongue of a cosmic snake forks a thousand thousand times and fills the sky with purple effulgence. A war in the heavens rocks the Earth with the shattering explosions of divine and diabolical artilleries. Zeus closes one eye, sticks out his tongue, and lets fly at an itinerant shepherd. A blast of blinding perfection shears the darkness into coruscating mirror fragments and leaves your eyes helpless to keep up. Angels play at Jarts.

Lightning.

Strikes 40 times a minute during the electric season in Florida. More lightning than anywhere in the world. It rockets from cloud to cloud and up from the ground and down into the trees and telephone poles and hapless golfers of the world. It's mad. It's monstrous. It's magnificent.

You can watch the sky light up with a seemingly endless string of new shapes and dream visions, in a thousand shades of white, blue, purple, red and green. You can watch the thunderheads duel. You can hear the roar of lightning splitting the rocks, the sound that made men think of dragons.

You can watch the world let off some steam.

With all the carpfish and hoopla we dump on our happy hunting grounds – the thick crusts of bubbling tar, the coughing metal boxes that excrete oil and breathe filth, the golem factories that tirelessly toss towering columns of blackened death into the air, the boats heaped with the detritus and wretched refuse of an overstuffed chair of a society, the glowing buckets of supernatural goo that reach right into the very core of life and swirl it around with some sort of unholy spaghetti fork – with all that piled on her back, dear Gran'ma'ma Gaea needs some way to vent her aggressions. And kind old biddy that she is, she only rarely opens the yawning earth beneath our feet and tosses us to the Miltonian hell of bubbling orange stone that we so patently deserve, or buries us beneath a tireless march of glaciers as large as the great state of Utah.

Instead she just tears at the sky.

Lightning tears.

Yes.

There's nothing in the world that's more beautiful or perfect than sitting on stone steps and soaking in the rich steamy feel of a hot field sopped with cool rain, with water drumming on your skin and thunder ringing in your ears, watching the thunderheads draw their swords and dance over the bay.

I love living in a tropical paradise.

- Wheel see what summer brings.

"Lightning never strikes twice. Unless you wait for it."