By Elizabeth Bishop Later | It’s late on a summer afternoon and the temperatures have been excruciatingly hot. These are the days when you emerge from an air conditioned building and walk as fast as your heart will let you without giving you a pain in your chest to your car which has been super-heated to over 120 degrees. It’s an oven in there so you open the car door, reach in carefully, and start the car so you can turn the air conditioning on full blast for a few minutes before you get in. You don’t dare get inside immediately lest you self-combust or get a third degree burn from the steering wheel.
It’s hot. And that’s an understatement.
To the east, across the river, the entire sky has turned bluish-black like a wall of bruise. A storm is on its way in from the ocean and this worries you more than the possible heat stroke you’re going to get inside your automobile, so you venture carefully into the car (mind anything metal), roll all the windows down to blow out the hot air, and hurry home. Getting caught on the road in one of these storms will lead one to wonder why cars sold in the south don’t come with skis and a propeller because so much water is going to come pouring down you’ll think how much a boat would come in handy right about now.
The low rumbling gradually gets louder and louder. The incredibly dark cloud creeps over you, darkening the sky and giving you a feeling of excited but anxious foreboding. Soon, the wind picks up, blowing moss out of the trees and sending oak leaves flying about.
It’s going to be a frog strangler.
Life in the Lowcountry is a gentle life – lazy days, warm nights, quiet moments in the swing watching the tide come in. But a Lowcountry thunderstorm is anything but gentle. It’s a raucous event; a jarring experience.
My parents taught us to have a healthy respect for thunderstorms. The story of my great uncle, whose mother stood on her porch calling for him to hurry….hurry….only to watch him get struck and killed by lightning as he galloped home on his horse served as a frequently told cautionary tale. The farm workers who were knocked out cold in the packing house when lightning hit the telephone line during tomato packing season was a perennial favorite story. If ever we started to forget, we were reminded. “Did I ever tell you about your great uncle?”
With this in mind, we had house rules when thunderstorms rolled in. We were instructed to come inside at the first sound of thunder and stay away from the windows. As the thunder got louder and louder we made our preparations, unplugging electrical appliances and getting out candles in case the lights went out. In my pre-teens my maternal grandmother, who lived in Kingstree (just a couple of hours up the road) told us about a whole series of houses there whose toilets blew up when lightning hit the sewer line. So then we had to add avoiding the bathroom to the list of precautions. You learned to use the bathroom before the storm but, if you didn’t and couldn’t hold it, you dashed into the bathroom between thunder claps and prayed that the toilet didn’t detonate while you were on it.
At the moment my parents decided the storm was close enough we all gathered in my parents’ bedroom in the center of the house, away from the chimney and the CB radio antenna. And there we waited it out, two adults and two children sitting on a bed, counting seconds between the lightning and the thunder to gauge the storm’s distance from us. 1-1000, 2-1000, 3-1000 we’d mutter…….
I don’t believe I was an anxious child, but I really didn’t like loud noises. So you can imagine what a thunderstorm that rolled in right over our house on St. Helena Island did for my nerves. I learned to gauge the brightness of the lightning which was a predictor of the decibel level of the thunder clap that followed. A bright flash sent me hunkering down, arms over my head, eyes squeezed shut in preparation for the crashing thunder that followed. The times when the lightning flashed at the same time the thunder rolled were enough to give somebody Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. No longer a rumble, the thunder turned into an explosion. The cats went under the bed. Were it not for the security of my parents’ presence I would have been under there with them.
These days I crave a good thunderstorm. I said this once to a friend from Iowa and she got a look of horror on her face. Her thunderstorms carried tornadoes; not a friendly memory. But there’s something oddly reassuring about the rumbling of the thunder, the feeling of electricity in the air, the absolutely impressive event that a Sea Island thunderstorm can be. And then, when the onslaught ceases, there’s the lingering scent of rain in the air, the soft humidity, the steam rising off the asphalt that has baked all day in the sun.
So on my list of things that remind me of home a good thunderstorm is right up there at the top. Bring on the heat. Bring on the thunder. Bring on the feeling of home.
Originally written as ‘Thunderstorm’ by Elizabeth Bishop Later for A Place Called Home: A memoir of Beaufort and St. Helena Island, South Carolina. You can read more from the book and writings of Sonny Bishop and Elizabeth Bishop Later at BishopsBest.com
