| WHEN HEAVENS GO BERSERK |
| Published in The Monterey County Herald, September 26, 2000 |
Late Wednesday evening,
several weeks ago, the heavens went berserk. While most
Montereyans were tucked away for the night, I had the rare, if
dubious, privilege of driving home from Salinas during one of the
most spectacular electrical storms ever to strike the Central
Coast.
Watching it from your yard or window, you might have found the
light show entertaining. Not so if you were traveling along
Blanco or Reservation Roads around midnight where you were
surrounded by nothing but open space. The effect was hardly
"entertaining". Lightening seemed to strike from almost
every direction at once, snaking and ripping across the sky.
Talons of fire scorched the horizon, illuminating the fields as
though it were the middle of the day. I felt like a wiener trying
to negotiate with a flaming grill. Never in 41 years of living
Back East, where lightening storms are more common than they are
here, had I witnessed so frightening a display. I had to look
away. Halfway home, the usually dry September sky pelted me with
rain and hail. None of this, I thought, was supposed to be
happening, not in this tame, uneventful corner of the globe. But
it was.
Would the lightening spare my house? Would our cozy little
community of Pacific Grove be ablaze by morning? Good questions.
Storms don't reason. They feel no pity. They care not a hoot for
our wealth or politics. They can't be bribed or reprogrammed to
strike elsewhere. There isn't a development large enough to scare
one off, or impress it into playing favorites. Even now, as I
write this account, the wildfires ignited by those lightening
strikes are still raging out of control in Tassajara and Big Sur.
Who's to say where there devastation will end? Or that the
lightening couldn't as easily have struck closer to home? Rather
sobering to realize how vulnerable we all are!
If cataclysms, fits of nature such as these, could, by any
stretch of our finite imaginations, serve a greater good, one
could say that they restore a healthy sense of proportion to our
lives. All the petty cares and conceits that cast such large
shadows across our landscape are suddenly reduced to their proper
size. So, too, the giants and bogeymen that troubled our dreams
must now, themselves, cower in terror. It is the very specter of
annihilation that forces us to love life more deeply, treasure
whatever serenity is granted us, and appreciate the good fortune
we might otherwise take for granted.
The recent tempest made me realize, yet again, that there is
nothing in nature, however freakish or unseasonable, that cannot
touch us. There is nothing we own that cannot be scorched,
flooded, toppled, buried, or swept into oblivion. Blessed are
those of us who, by God's grace, have been spared this great and
terrible lesson in perspective---who can profit by it without
having to learn it through personal calamity. Happy is the man
who counts his blessings in the present tense.