Stopping to hear thunder

April 25, 2002

Dear Pat,

Tornados and high winds blustered through Southeast Missouri last night, scaring people and doing some damage. These are the natural forces humans in these parts have the most reason to fear, and we give them the respect they are due, but in truth they rarely confront us.

Thunderstorms are of more concern to our little beagle. At the first rumble his eyes roll upward as if scanning the ceiling for the source of the dreaded sound. When the real booms start he goes into a full panic. Panting, his long pink tongue hanging to his chest, he begins trembling like a Chihuahua.

The worst of it is, Alvie is inconsolable. During a storm last week, I found him hiding in the corner of my closet. We hold him when the thunder sounds, but he doesn't stop panting and shaking until the storm passes. We wonder about making him a panic box to go to when thunder makes the air and Alvie shiver.

We know he spent part of his life homeless. Perhaps the jagged scar that runs down his left side is the result of an accident during a storm. Perhaps it's just frightening to be alone when the world seems to be cracking apart.

Alvie is like a primitive who believes thunder is the gods growling. But how far off is that? It is a sound the forces of Creation make. We know it as the noise expanding air makes when instantly heated by lightning. But those are just the terms we've made up to make us think we understand.

It's still a mystery. All of being alive is. This is no a Disneyland show or movie. This is the energy that creates life, and we and the animals instinctively know it.

Fear can be acquired, of course. My mother, who never learned to swim and is afraid to put her head under water, taught me to be afraid too. Understandably, she didn't want her children to drown. It took a second set of swimming lessons at age 30 for me to overcome the fear. That's the difficult and miraculous thing about fears, they disappear when faced.

Hank and Lucy aren't happy during a storm. They stay close and occasionally make grunting noises during a big crash. Alvie has heart palpitations.

I tried singing to him during a thunderstorm early Wednesday morning, not a real song but just some notes I hoped would be comforting. DC said they sounded like something a serial killer might sing.

Unless I'm on the golf course, thunder and lightning have the opposite effect on me they do on Alvie. I feel engulfed by the rain of charged particles pouring from the sky. The ozone whiff in the air is intoxicating.

So much in modern life is numbing: television, drinking, pain pills, jobs that deaden instead of stimulate. Even if it's just a walk in the park, the feel of grass and earth underfoot instead of concrete, the natural world instead of the digitized reality many of us spend our days and nights inside, is the prescription for much that troubles us.

A storm is the proverbial breath of fresh air. It reminds us that we are more than our daily schedules, more than someone who owes many thousands of dollars, more than someone who has a bad back, more than someone with a broken heart, more than a janitor and more than the president of the United States, more than an idiot and more than a Nobel Prize winner, more than a tiny speck on a little blue planet in one of uncountable solar systems in a universe we can't find an end to.

A storm reminds us we are connected to the very forces that created that universe.

If that isn't exciting, what is?

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.