It's Not Just a Special Effect
Last night in the middle of the night, I heard a crack of thunder and saw the room lit with a flash even though the curtains had been drawn in the bedroom. The window of the bathroom was open, so I hopped up and went into the bathroom to close the window; and just as I managed to get it closed and battened down, the rain started pouring down as if someone had turned on a faucet.
You know how one sees people in the old black and white movies showing how fx were done to simulate a Nor'Eastern storm; rattling a big sheet of tin and throwing buckets of water on the actors on the stage?
It always seemed to unrealistic to me, a kid in LA who had only seen LA rains, the downpours were so thick you almost couldn't breath in 'em, but it all came straight down all at once. Not in waves, sheets of waves of water... but last night it was just like that... like a bucket brigade throwing buckets of water against the roof, I could see the splashes of a wave of water hitting the pitched roof in the light of the near constant lightning, and the constant pour of the water from the eaves and gutters. I could feel the wind pounding against the window I'd just closed.
In Colorado when thunderstorms hit it's big crack-booms of thunder, lightning like fireworks from sky to earth, but sudden and quick and as huge as the sky is out there, it's never more than a little slice of it. Here the thunder kept going and going and going like a man shaking a sheet of tin, and the lightning was constant, flickering like a bonfire, not anything like in Colorado where it's a quick crack in the sky or the ball of lightning bouncing across the wide open sky. Here the sky is narrowed by the trees until it's just a slice of the world that was filled with the wild fire of lightning.
It lasted just 15 minutes. The boys slept right through it, we'd all been up until midnight playing card games, talking, and listening to Tim play on the banjo, Brenda on the fiddle, and George on his five-gallon bucket bass. They slept right through it while I sat on the closed toilet and watched a true Northeast thunderstorm roll through.
You know how one sees people in the old black and white movies showing how fx were done to simulate a Nor'Eastern storm; rattling a big sheet of tin and throwing buckets of water on the actors on the stage?
It always seemed to unrealistic to me, a kid in LA who had only seen LA rains, the downpours were so thick you almost couldn't breath in 'em, but it all came straight down all at once. Not in waves, sheets of waves of water... but last night it was just like that... like a bucket brigade throwing buckets of water against the roof, I could see the splashes of a wave of water hitting the pitched roof in the light of the near constant lightning, and the constant pour of the water from the eaves and gutters. I could feel the wind pounding against the window I'd just closed.
In Colorado when thunderstorms hit it's big crack-booms of thunder, lightning like fireworks from sky to earth, but sudden and quick and as huge as the sky is out there, it's never more than a little slice of it. Here the thunder kept going and going and going like a man shaking a sheet of tin, and the lightning was constant, flickering like a bonfire, not anything like in Colorado where it's a quick crack in the sky or the ball of lightning bouncing across the wide open sky. Here the sky is narrowed by the trees until it's just a slice of the world that was filled with the wild fire of lightning.
It lasted just 15 minutes. The boys slept right through it, we'd all been up until midnight playing card games, talking, and listening to Tim play on the banjo, Brenda on the fiddle, and George on his five-gallon bucket bass. They slept right through it while I sat on the closed toilet and watched a true Northeast thunderstorm roll through.