I think the spine of the heat wave has been broken; but not before we had a flash storm that alternated between headache producing thunder, crashing rain & crashing rain with hail… and, oh yes, lightening.
Route 1 could not cope with the volume of rain and the road looked like a river. The parking lot in front of Grapes (which I refer to as our Lido) looked like high tide with water bubbling up from the catch basin.
Maybe the intensity of the storm was fitting… it matched the unbearable heat and humidity that preceded it.
But the storm tapered, and presumably moved down the line to the East and North. And it was 9:00PM and the close of the business day had arrived. Time to head home. I had expected to see in the storm’s wake, numbers of trees downed and sections of neighborhoods without light.
I had charted a course back to Woodbury… first the Merritt Parkway in a northeasterly path, then nearly due north on Route 8, exiting to back roads… first Route 334, then 188 before hooking into 67 and finally 6.
It’s a route I have taken many times. And I was hoping that the storm’s path had hugged the shoreline and had not moved inland. I don’t enjoy driving in storms, nor do I like to suffer detours around roads blocked by fallen trees.
Aside from some branches that had made their way to the edges of the Merritt, my route was damage free… at least from what I could see.
Yet it appeared that I was following the storm… you know the sequence, the sky changes, then thunder, then lightening, then heavy drops that splat, then heavy rain with thunder and lightening, then wind and then finally as the rain recedes, a trail of lightening remains as a reminder of what had just taken place.
And now as I turned north on Route 8 I could see flashes of light in the sky ahead. The road was dry, still cars slowed, maybe worried for what lay over the next ridge. This section of Route 8 is fairly open with good lines of sight, and on what is usually a “fast road” to be doing less than 70mph seemed a crime… yet there was something scary about those flashes of light. So yes, slow down.
During an Army Reserve Summer Camp at Indiantown Gap, I had the opportunity to see (and hear) cannon fire at night. I was miles from the artillery range; but what I saw and heard gave me chills and respect for the sorry grunts who had to endure shelling in the trenches of the Sommes in 1914.
And when I turned off of 8 and on to 334 those flashes of light loomed closer… and I thought about how cannon fire eerily lit up a sky… you knew that a flash represented the discharge of an artillery round, and that flash upon flash represented a battery laying down a barrage in a sector.
On 334 and then 188, the road narrows… several hills, tight curves and trees that line the lane. And in the sky, sudden bursts of light. No sound of thunder… merely a pop of light in the night sky.
It’s not like I haven’t seen lightening before; but on this night it was different. And it was different because of the sky. The heavens lacked uniformity. The sky was not cloaked in a flat cloud cover. Rather the sky was a patchwork quilt of layered puffy clouds with the night’s “true sky” making only sporadic appearances thru apertures in the clouds.
On another night the moon would have reflected against those clouds lending a “haunted house” quality to the landscape.
But on this night it was blazes of lightening that projected ochre and mauve thru the cloud formations. More than anything else, the change of colours recalled the variety of light seen on the 4th of July when you see the effects of the fireworks; but not the fireworks themselves.
This was not mere lightening. This was a light show. And it made any staged expensive fireworks/light/laser show insignificant by comparison.
