Crestone #9: Summer storm

Ask anybody from around these parts and she or he will tell you it’s been a wet spring and summer. That is why, you will be told, there are still so damned many mosquitoes around. By early July the San Luis Valley is usually a much dryer place.

During our stay here at Nada, though, rain has been an almost daily occurrence in the valley. Not that it rained here every day, mind you, but from our vantage point in the sandy foothills just slightly up from the valley floor, you can see rain showers from miles away. Last night around dusk, though, was the masterpiece.

Built with solar heating in mind, all of the Nada hermitages have large glass southern exposures. Thus, we have two large windows in the living area looking south. Just as the sun was making its daily spectacular exit over the San Juan range on the other side of the San Luis, a large system of dark cumulus moved slowly toward us from the southwest, dropping rain as it came. At the same time, looking due south, we saw another system dumping sheets of rain on what we assumed was Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve, less than 20 miles away as the raven flies. Folks down there in the campground were getting mighty wet.

The system moving toward us from the southwest kept coming and growing, beginning to give us a spectacular, unobscured lightning show. First Cindy wondered if she saw lightning at all, seeing both it and a reflection in the glass next to her window seat where she was reading. Before too long, though, the book was set down and plans for a simple dinner were put on hold while we both sat facing south as the sky and the day darkened.

First one, then another, then another complete branching of lightning was seen, sky to valley. The ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ you could hear from us were as good as any uttered at any Fourth of July fireworks display. To say it was spectacular doesn’t do the lightning justice. We sat in awe as the natural pyrotechnics lit up the ever darkening sky. When the rain finally got to us, it wasn’t really much. But the lightening continued overhead as the storm moved ever closer to the mountains.

We finally had a couple of flashes overhead, then all was over. I told Cindy the lightning show was the best movie I had seen yet this summer. And when I stood outside for a little while during the approach, I said it was even better than anything IMAX could film. Wow.

We came to be with summer mountains and have to admit the mosquitoes have made it very difficult to do much outside. As our stay in the Juliana hermitage comes to an end next week, we will take not only lessons of the quiet back east with us, but vivid mental images of a nighttime thunderstorm that Nikon could not record. It will be a story we will only be able to tell about.

Today’s elder idea: The only paradise I know is the one lit by our everyday sun, this land of difficult love, shot through with shadow. The place where we learn this love, if we learn it at all, shimmers behind every new place we inhabit.

Scott Russell Sanders

from “Buckeye”

Writing from the Center