Weathering Storms

Content warning: Story contains some profanity

The sky looked like an old bruise laced with veins of fire, and the rumble of thunder grew steadily closer. I had begun to look for any kind of shelter in the sage-dotted hills miles ago, but I had seen nothing. This truly was a desolate country, and I was stuck in the middle of it. With fingers crossed, I headed to the next rise.

Rise? My brain was making mountains out of molehills.

The landscape was flat with “hills” not much more than hummocks I couldn’t see over, and “valleys” that were either washouts or polycrete-lined irrigation ditches.

Hiking had not been the plan. I wanted to drive across the country, making my own looping path as I meandered west. I chose to see the country up close and personal after the diagnosis.

Oh, the stares I’d gotten. People didn’t hear much internal combustion these days outside of museums or specialty events, and then those engines were usually tiny. They heard this. The metallic forest-green 1967 GTO with the lime-green pinstriping didn’t purr or putter. Its big block 400 roared and rumbled.

But the engine in the old Pontiac blew three months into the trip. The chances of repair were slim to none with astronomical price tags attached. I turned to hitchhiking. When there were few cars and fewer drivers, hitching became hiking.

If the storm chasing me carried snow, I could get under a bridge or into a culvert. But that would be the last place I wanted to be during a gully washer. In case of a flash flood, seek high ground, but when there's lightning it should be avoided, right. Of course, none of the safety tips I'd read so long ago mentioned what to do on mostly flat ground.

Great, I thought. Rock and a hard place, or frying pan and fire.

I hadn’t decided which idiom worked best yet. The flashes and wall of rain came closer.

I patted my pockets for the umpteenth time, looking for a phone I knew I didn’t bring. When I’d left, there had been no one I wanted to talk to. Besides, it would have been dead even if I had brought one; wind currents didn’t provide much charge, and I doubted there was any signal anyway.

That’s okay.

This wasn’t the first storm I’d weathered. With a little luck, I’d come through sodden but standing to face one more.

The first icy drops smacked the back of my head hard, and I fumbled my hat out of my coat pocket. The cold made me wonder about protocol during a hailstorm. I doubted I was limber enough to kiss my own ass goodbye, but that was the best I could come up with on short notice.

Still no shelter on the horizon, but I kept my fingers crossed; this time against hail.

Wind blew constantly across the high desert. Most of the time, it just passed through, carrying the rest of the sounds away, creating a kind of contemplative silence. I began to hear it as it picked up speed and whipsawed in direction. It whispered and shushed through the sage, throwing more rain at my back.

The dusty, gravelly soil on the shoulder started to darken and cake. The wind threw this at me, too, but it had started to stick, staining the cuffs of my jeans blue-gray and camouflaging my shoes.

I slipped on my driving gloves, tugging my jacket tighter, and continued walking.

Water streamed from the narrow brim of the bucket hat. It had collapsed under the rain’s incessant beat and had become more of a skullcap. It worked fine at keeping the sun off my balding dome when the top was down, but failed miserably at keeping the rain off. My coat fared a little better, but I felt wet at the seams.

The first lightning strike I saw clearly was about a quarter mile away. The thunder was deafening. My ears rang, and my retinas carried afterimages, double exposures of fire dimming everything else.

The next strike was much closer. I blinked in pain and covered my ears. Through my gloved hands, the wind’s shrieking mingled with tinnitus, forming sounds I couldn’t make out and did not want to hear — a susurration of distant voices.

“Seek safety,” I thought the wind said. “Stay safe.”

“Think this through,” rumbled the thunder.

I broke into a stumbling jog, shaking the mud from my shoes with each step. The wind, which had been pushing me forward, whirled and wheeled, slowing me down, blowing the bucket hat away into the gray.

Zipping a coat tighter was possible while jogging. I’d done it before. This time, the rain, wind, and noise… I slipped in the mud and rolled into the ditch. Landing face-first in a shallow puddle, I chuckled. I had said I wanted to get up close and personal with the country, but this was a bit much.

I struggled to my feet and back up to the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop. It rippled silver-gray in the downpour. I started to brush myself off, smearing the mud and vegetation, but stopped; rain would no doubt do a better job than gloved hands.

Lightning struck again in the ditch where I had been lying. The force of the soundwave knocked me off my feet. I felt my skin redden and the hair on the side facing the ditch crisped.

I sat in the middle of the road, batting at my deafened ears and blinking my blinded eyes. The afterimages formed faces and landscapes, and the tinnitus said, “Please.”

I stood and stared up with clenched fists raised against the storm. Being a cliché in the middle of nowhere did not bother me as I ranted at the boiling skies.

“What do you want from me?” I screamed.

The storm did not answer.

“I can’t go back,” I cried. “I don’t want to be that shriveled old man everyone has to care for. I’ve spent sixty-seven years wiping my own ass, and I can’t, won’t deal with that kind of humiliation.”

“Family first,” the voices sighed.

A distant flash of lightning sketched my wife’s face against the clouds. As it forked, the face changed into that of my daughter.

“I know,” I screamed. “Why do you think I’m doing this? I’m saving them from that. I wear the fucking pants, not a damn hospital gown.”

The sound changed subtly. Under the shriek of the wind, the rumble of thunder, and the pounding of water droplets, a steady hiss emerged. I waited for a new message, still raging.

“You don’t have an answer for that, do you, you bastard?”

Over the rise I had been trying to reach, lights appeared, scattering into millions of micro-prisms that vanished as fast as they formed.

A car approached, its electric motors silent, but the tires hissed on the wet pavement.

I splashed through the puddles back to the road’s side. No raised thumb; this driver was heading east, but they braked to a stop opposite me regardless.

As their driver’s windows slid down, I heard them shouting over the din.

“Get in!” they said from behind the tinted glass. “You’ll catch your death.”

I shook my head. Catching death was inevitable.

“C’mon,” they cajoled. “At least dry off a bit and warm up. I think I have a towel in back, and I can just as easily dump you when the storm’s over.”

Looking to the horizon, all I could see were storm clouds. The blanket of thunderous wetness covered everything. The driver was right, and I walked to the passenger side.

The driver popped the lock, and I climbed in. He was already rummaging in the back seat for a towel, which he located and handed to me.

“Jeez, man,” the young man said, voice still raised to be heard over the drumming on the roof. “You must’ve been out in the shit... Uh, sorry, stuff for a while. What the heck are you doing out here? There’s not another town for at least fifty miles.”

“My car died,” I explained.

I scrubbed the proffered towel over my face while worming out of the soaked jacket. “Engine blew about two hundred miles back. Car stopped, I didn’t.”

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Away,” I said. “Look, I appreciate the towel and the heater, but I’d rather not talk about it. Why are you driving the god-forsaken stretch?”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, deflating a little. “I’m headed east. Got a call last week… my Dad’s been put into hospice care. Cancer.”

“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He wiped a droplet from under his left eye that must’ve snuck in when he rolled the window down. “He’s surrounded by friends and family. Well, most of the family, but I’ll be there soon enough.”

I looked out the passenger window. The rain was slowing, and the sky had lightened a little. Okay, okay, I thought. Message received.

“I guess I could ride along a while to see where we go.”

He put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road, smiling. In the east, the clouds broke.

“Good choice,” he said.

“So I’ve been told.”