Picture this: in the dark, four twentysomething eastcoast whitekids hunched in shelter. The shelter consists of two tarps and a 1990 Jeep Cherokee. The Cherokee is a dark gold color, and its trunk is open. The front and rear passenger seats are full of equipment, luggage, and a borrowed six-string guitar. Roles being reversed, the hatchback area of the vehicle is not occupied by gear, but by two of the people. The remaining two are crouched on the ground a few feet away. The tarps each measure 9’ x 12’ and are royal blue. The first tarp rises from the ground, where it is pinned to a carpet of loblolly pine needles by a massive log of the same species. The second tarp is sutured to the first, but oriented horizontally, rising tangential to the raised backdoor of the Jeep. It is an improvised bivouac, open on two sides, closed on four.
The tarps whip as sails will, snapping in a gale. Were this a sloop rather
than a Jeep, that would not be metaphorical, but simply accurate. Wind is
screaming through the loblollies; encountering Tarp #1 head-on. Rain is gushing
over the tarps and the car. Rain is fragmenting in spray as it falls. Rain
is gunneling along the seam between the tarps, working its way around the
doorframe of the car, pooling around the tires and the feet of the two people
on the ground. Every few seconds, the horizontal tarp disgorges a bolus of
pooled rain. It fills, flexes, and then –as a trampoline will – rebounds.
A terrific splash results, gouging the soil at the corner of the lean-to.
I am one of the people. As the thunderstorm nears its crescendo, I am telling
my joke. I only know one joke; and I save it for last in situations like this.
To pass time in a thunderstorm, you can ogle the lightning, point out thrashing
tree limbs to each other, or you can chat. After we had run through a round
of weather conversation, Kathryn told a joke. Then Chris told a joke and Rachel
told a joke. It was my turn. My joke is a long joke: one whose humor derives
from the fact that it takes five minutes to tell, chock full of details, and
ends with a non sequitor unrelated to the whole story. Ostensibly, it’s about
horses. Really, it’s about tricking people into listening to a pointless tale.
If you ever go camping with me, you may hear it over a crackling fire or,
as now, to pass the time as we shelter from a storm. As I speak, the rain
courses down in convex rivulets and forms images of distortion on the windows
of the Jeep. In an instant, everything is bathed in pink light. Tree branches
are revealed on the ground by their shadows. Individual moving droplets are
strobe-lit into apparent stasis; lightning showing their instantaneous position
on the tie-lines. Darkness, “one one-thousand, two one-thous-”, ka-blam. Thunder
shakes the campground, reverberates in the woods and glass and plastic sheeting,
dissipates, is absorbed by the layer of wet brown pine needles.
From the two open sides of our shelter, we can observe the pitch of the falling
drops. The rain describes a trajectory of 45º from the horizontal. 45º
from the horizontal is the same as 45º from the vertical. I make a deduction:
In this storm, the force of the wind is equal to the force of gravity.
We’d been camping for not quite 24 hours now, in Jane’s Island State Park
in Maryland. We finished a dinner of roasted cob corn and burritos of black
beans, white rice, crimson salsa, and guacamole the luminous color of a nuclear
byproduct. As we masticated our meal, thunder sounded from the east at increasing
intervals. Birds stopped singing. We battened down our hatches. Chris zipped
up his tent. Rachel put food in the Jeep. Kathryn pulled drying clothes off
of a line. Using my Swiss Army knife, I hurriedly carved stakes to pin a third
tarp to the earth around my tent.
When all preparations had been made, we walked a short distance from site
C-85, and stood on the bank of Daugherty Creek Canal, which separates Jane’s
Island from the Delmarva Peninsula. Over the salt marshes, the storm approached.
A varicose vein of a million watts traveled from land to cloud. The jagged
bolt inscribed a false-color memory on my retina: the stripe waggled in my
eyeball as I jogged back to the site. Thunder chased me down the path.
An attack of meteorology: The tempest hit with a blitzkrieg of wind, followed
by a barrage of high-yield droplets. After twenty minutes of this (culminating
in the telling of my horse joke) came a barrage of new electrical discharges,
seriatim, each louder than the last. It was the storm’s second wind, and we
watched the world get wetter. When this too had passed, the four of us turned
our attention to the campsite.
A lake had formed in the site, and regardless of the efficacy of our tarp
shelters and polycoated rain-flies, we had problems. When the water falls
faster than the ground can absorb it, a flood occurs. I unzipped my tent:
the sleeping bag was afloat on an inch of standing water, not a drop of which
had leaked through the roof. Like a man escaping from prison, it had come
from below. It had upwelled. I had been prepared for rain; but this
spreading lake had caught me off guard.
The other tent fared slightly better, but was damp too. We discussed, and opted to break camp and depart. To do so, we waded through our campsite, and snorkeled to find submerged tent stakes. Despite immersion, our headlamps blazed strong I was reminded of lighthouse. We wadded our wet nylon into a ball and tied it to the roof. As Rachel drove us back to her house near St. Michael’s, Maryland, I slept soundly to the susurrus of windshield wipers and tires humming on wet asphalt.