Three Essays:

Wheeler, Texas May 24, 2000  by Jim Williams © 2001



All those clear-sky, half-thousand-mile busted out days.
All those gas station gut-grenade burritos.
All those flattened, shiny-side-down, roadside armadillos
out in the flattened nowhere on the way to caps screwed down tighter
than rusty tractor bolts.
And then this.
This prairie skyship, unfurling her sails along the stratosphere out over Wheeler toward the Red River.
I stand camera to eye, the inflow prodding my back.
I am mesmerized by the solidness of the storm base.
How like the snowy foothill of some Himalayan mountain.
Could we not climb this storm with ropes and crampons?
Above the sloping base, thunderous upper layers blossom into full boom.
How Jovian these glowing upper tiers.
Would not some hapless Jupiter probe fall into clouds like these?
Off to the side, the timid red ingot of our sun seems inconsequential.
Embarrassed, it sets without notice.
My widest-angle lens cannot contain the immensity of this pirouetting H-bomb ballerina.
I pan endlessly along its tri-state beavertail, then back through slithering eels of anvil lightning.
A gossamer curtain of rain luffs casually out of the base onto a field
of parched alfalfa while adjacent drought-brittle fields remain unquenched,
teased and cajoled by a million tons of water drifting eastward overhead.
The bloated lowering beneath the storm persists.
It feeds leisurely on dark tags of scud that appear like ragamuffin ghosts, then disappear.
A spear of lightning pierces nearby. One-thousand-one...ka-BAM!
Another slam of thunder and we pull away.
Tomorrow we'll blast through two states, pull over downwind of some feedlot
in a field full of chiggers and watch a cloudless sky set solid like yellow varnish.
But today...
What a glorious day in the cathedral of Thor!





Lightning Kills Me!  by Jim Williams © 1999

Our little caravan pulls over. A half-dozen of us exit our vehicles squat-walking, our heads below car-top level. To the north, lightning dances around a lowering. Black horses of scud join that dark, low calliope as we set up our cameras. Our tripods are telescoped short. We must kneel to frame our shots, like peeking through forbidden keyholes.

Above us, white crawlers snake into and out of the anvil. Someone says, "Stay away from that fence. It'll run a mile down a fence to get ya!" The air around us is laden with a heavy, living "presence." Sounds seem more acute, the birds closer.

We know the odds. Maybe 20 million strikes a year, over a hundred of them fatal. Eighty yards off, an orphaned telephone pole volunteers some comfort. But the fact is, our love of troubled skies is the love of a moth to a 55,000 degree flame.

I should know better...

Two years ago in Payson, Arizona, I climbed atop a rock to video a rainbow. A noisy storm had trundled past and a few late-falling drops of rain arrived from a blue sky. The sun was already steaming the rain from that rock as I mumbled some inane comment into my camera. (Aren't last words often unremarkable?)

Then that hot slap atop my head. Whap! Like a faithhealer's burning hand, drubbing me down. Hallelujah! A sound too loud to be heard or remembered. What cycled my camera off? The EMP of the bolt? Or the contraction of every muscle in my body as I clenched into a ball---my head fleeing, like a turtle's, into the top of my rib cage. Sixteen paces away, a crack had opened up in my world and I could see that blinding white light into which our spirits are said to be beckoned.

I sometimes watch my surviving wide-angle video frame by frame, the hellish stutter of the strike strobing on-off, on-off, on-off.

So we stand out there, the mood electric, cajoling that lowering to give us a tube. It only taunts and malingers as the day closes. A jumbo-sized raindrop wings me. I take off my ballcap and place it over my camera. Those little buttons atop our ballcaps...those little doorbell buttons to eternity.

Lightning doesn't care who you are or about your passion for wild skies or your "respect" for nature.

Only that you're the tallest thing.





A Town on the Plains  by Jim Williams © 1999

Somewhere along the seam of the horizon, sky and earth permit these towns to happen, like toughened sprouts between the cracks of a sidewalk. Tenacious, unassuming little towns down the road. If I squint I can see a silo. Then distant rows of telephone poles intersect at a clump of trees and a water tower. Here we have a town waiting for a storm. I admire these deferring towns that stand before the skies and say, "No, you go first."

The sun is getting low, but the day persists with no one in sight to remark upon it or upon the churning aliveness of the wheat swirling around us. We are out ahead of a storm, a line of storms. We pass the rusted hulk of a school bus at the edge of town, its yellow paint cautioning uselessly. Then a small, empty building, its worn brick still imprinted with the shadow of a horse, a flying red horse. A gray double silo stands alone by the road like an immense statue fragment, just the legs of some nameless god.

Then we seem to be through the town. What did I see? Young men huddled by the cab of a pickup truck, toeing the dirt, pulling down their caps against the wind, wrapping up their words. We turn north along rolling, treelined streets of old bricks that soon give way to gravel. To the west, a squall line approaches, the canopy of its anvil unfurling over our heads. We pass a young dog, racing along side us. He glances up at me. His eyes tell me he won't make it under the house.

Up ahead, more trees, a tiny hamlet of old, careworn homes. An icepick of light cuts a pink afterimage into the corner of my eye and thunder braces us with its mannish hug.

The wind ranges along, tussling the treetops. The trees swoon behind us as the road opens ahead. The once thin, black grimace of the storm is gaping over us. And up inside its mouth I see aquarium blue-green shafts of hail. A whack. A ping. We're in the cold downchucking of dime-size ice. Then nickel. Then quarter. We speed up and ten miles east pull over. The storm advances upon us, swallowing our world. Let's head southward for better seats. Maybe the last thunderhead will drop a tube.

Seven miles south, we watch the storm train go by, its steam boiling into the sky, its rumbling wheels flattening the wheatfields. A storm train one hundred miles long, turning on streetlights from Medicine Lodge to El Dorado.

We sit in awe and share a simple truth: We could live for days without food and minutes without air, but not for seconds if God took our storms away.