two storms

One of my early memories is of standing in front of the bedroom window looking out at a storm. I was jumping up and down and shouting and laughing. There was a mature english walnut tree in the backyard just in front of me. The wind was twisting and tossing it around like a mop, branches were breaking off and flying away. Then suddenly the whole scene shifts upwards, like the view from a banking airplane, and then recedes...and the venetian blind on the window blasts inwards, followed by glass and curtains and leaves.
This was the Columbus Day storm. It happened in 1962. I was fine.

A heavy, sodden heatwave had been sitting in the Willammette Valley, stinking of smoke and pulp mills. It was August of1968. In the evenings we would sit out under the apple trees at my grandmothers house until way late...in fact, the entire neiborhood used to ramble around on nights like this, smoking and talking, kids riding their bikes, until the early chill fell and made it possible to catch a couple of hours of sleep.
One night the stillness broke and a wind came up and flowed out over the grass in the yard, smoothing it down in a long wave. All the adults looked at each other with smiles, because they knew that there was rain coming soon. They gathered up all the lawn chairs and ashtrays and beer bottles and headed back inside to open all the windows and doors and wait.
I was looking out my bedroom window when a sudden burst of light lit up the dark. It was completely silent. It made me catch my breath and freeze, waiting for a blast, but it never happened.
" Heat lightning," my parents said. I ran from window to window to catch it going off.
People began to come back out onto the street to watch. At first it was flashes of radiance that seemed to come from the entire sky at once, then it resolved in the west as snakes of lightning that travelled across the banked clouds with the eerie deliberation of a spark travelling up a Jacobs ladder. All in silence.
" I want to go up on the rooof of the barn", I said. This was a small one-cow shed with a flat sloping roof in our back yard. My parents agreed, making me promise to come in if the rain started or the lightning began to strike the ground.
From the roof of the barn I could see over the neiborhood treetops. I had the entire sky to myself. Everyone else had gone in.
Incredible dancing ribbons of electricity snaked across the clouds, from one side of the horizon to the other. Some fanned out in their termination like a map of an electric Nile in the sky. Some streaks ran like morse code, intermittent, or a rock skipping on a pond. All in silence. A carnival green light filled whole clouds, reds like faded christmas bulbs, canary yellows, easter blues.
The wind moved this mute storm right over where I lay on the shingles. The clouds were low and fat, and when it was directly overhead all the small fine hairs on my arms and face tingled up in a brush. It smelled like morning. Giant broad bolts of lightening like oak trees washed down a fast river current moved across the air directly above me. It sounded faint, like holiday paper burning in the fireplace.
I rolled down off the roof and went inside, brushing off the crumbs from the shingles. The rain hit the glass door behind me in a solid sheet the instant that it shut. It rained like all the ocean pouring onto the roof of the house for the rest of the night, and I laid in bed and listened to it.