Chapter 7
Zach rose from a deep dreamless sleep into semi-waking in a seamless transition. He didn’t know what had roused him and didn’t care. He felt safe and at peace. He knew he was in the van, in the middle of the sage desert. He knew without checking the luminous dial of his watch that it was the dead center of the night—the moonless dark was absolute, no glimmer of lingering dusk to the west, no hint of dawn to the east. Without lifting his head off the pillow, he was able to scan three directions of the compass out the van’s wrap-around windows. And in all directions he saw distant thunderheads flashing, no thunder audible, the sudden flares of their lightning so remote as to seem imagined, like someone striking a match in the dark tunnel of a dream—then again over here, then again over there: nature’s silent full-surround light show. On previous nights he’d waked to see one or two remote thunderheads, and had marveled then at how massive and unimpeded the horizon was out here. But never had he seen so many storms, and so active—not out here, not anywhere. He slid back into a shallow peaceful rest.
Later, he couldn’t say how long, he was awakened by the rumble of thunder. It was still fairly distant, but any sound in the desert’s absolute quiet was startling and unsettling. Zach kept his eyes closed and waited for the next rumble. In the taut silence, he noticed other sounds so faint he’d missed them before. He heard the tinkle of the tags on Gina’s collar as she lay panting on her bed on the front seat (she was terrified of thunderstorms). He heard a faint scurrying on metal and wondered if there was a mouse on the roof of the van. A flash of lightning cut through his closed eyelids. He began counting—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. The thunder rumbled, long and much louder than before.
Zach started to feel uneasy but chose to keep his eyes closed, trying to will the storm away or, failing that, will himself and by extension the van’s other occupants to calm. He was acutely aware that the van was the tallest structure between the river and the hills, a metal magnet for the lightning’s electricity. Then he recalled reading that tires acted as insulators from the lightning’s path to ground, making a car in the middle of an open field one of the safest places to be during a lightning storm. He took a few seconds’ consolation from that understanding, then heard Gina panting louder. He wondered if she’d jump over the seat to reach them. He listened for Allison’s breathing, trying to determine if she were awake. He heard no sound coming from her side of the bed.
The lightning flashed again, much brighter this time. One, two, three, four, five, six—a loud crack of thunder like a gunshot, followed by an extended and raucous rumble that shook the van. In the brief silence that followed, Zach could hear the beginnings of the wind from the storm—a far off whisper at first, through the brush, steadily growing as it raced across the prairie. Bits of sand arrived ahead of the gale, peppering the doors and windows, then small twigs rattling, then tumbleweeds scurrying over and around the van like fleeing animals.
Another flash of lightning, this one so intense it was seared into Zach’s retinas despite having his eyes closed. One, two, three—BOOM! It felt like the ground had opened beneath the van and was threatening to swallow it whole. Then the full force of the gale struck, rocking the van violently from side to side. Gina whimpered and pawed at the seat and the door. The wind slammed into the van in short-cycle gusts, then in a single protracted gust that felt like it was lifting the van off its tires on one side.
Every cell in Zach’s body was crying out to do something to save his dog, his wife, and himself from certain utter destruction out here in the wilderness. But in an instant’s clarity, in a rush of calm fatalism and resignation that matched and, briefly, defused his fear, he knew there was nothing he could do. His fate, and the fate of the two living things in the world that he’d been given—had requested—responsibility for, were at the mercy of forces totally beyond his control. For just a millisecond, he felt peace at this brand new realization. He opened his eyes to look at his wife.
Then he remembered Gina’s chain grounding the van, a perfect path for the lightning’s deadly track.
A bolt so bright that it seemed to originate inside the van seared everything in brilliant white. In that instant he looked at Allison and saw two remarkable things—his wife’s eyes so full of fear that he knew he’d never be able to eradicate it, no matter how long or how hard he tried; and a mouse scurrying through her hair, apparently as desperate to find safety as every other living thing in the vicinity. Zach shrieked, “Oh, my God.”
Allison recalled campfire stories from her childhood that told how one’s hair stood on end just before lightning struck to kill you. She’d wondered how anyone knew this fact, since the only witnesses to it were all dead. But she nonetheless accepted it as a fact. So when the lightning flashed and she felt her hair rise up, she knew that she would be dead in an instant. And in that instant before death, she was profoundly disappointed to be dying out here in the wilderness, so far from people and friends.
Except, she didn’t die. No living thing in the area died in that lightning strike except the scraggly jackpine on the far side of the sheepwagon, where the bolt found its way to ground (and who knows, tough as that tree looked, it might manage to send a fresh shoot out of the char—next year, or maybe the year after).
Immediately after the simultaneous lightning strike and thunder clap, the wind died and the rain came. The deluge on the van’s metal roof was deafening, and yet a relief after what had come before. The lightning and thunder continued but more distant, the pause between flash and rumble steadily growing longer.
The rain pounded the roof in waves, as if the ocean that had once lapped these shores had returned, dropped whole from the sky. Gina panted and whimpered and scratched at the seat and the dash. The mouse was gone, returned to some safer, more familiar hiding place. And Allison buried her face in Zach’s chest and cried hysterically, inconsolably, for what seemed an eternity, her sobs continuing long after the storm had moved on and the rain had stopped and Gina had quit whimpering and silence had again laid claim to the land except for Allison’s sobs and sniffles, which also faded in due time as the two of them finally fell into exhausted sleep, Allison’s face lying on Zach’s tear-drenched shirt.
Chapter 8
The next day dawned brilliantly clear, dry, and windy—same as all the previous dawns. Zach and Allison rose and went about their waking routines as before. The only evidence of the storm was in the color of the sagebrush—a few shades closer to green, further from gray—and in the splintered pine tree some twenty yards from the camp. The prairie had already shrugged off the violent storm and torrential rain of just a few hours before, tossing it aside as a minor disturbance in a history peppered with upheavals of far greater violence and destruction.
After finishing his cereal, Zach paused in front of Allison on his way to rinsing his bowl. “Want to try one more day?”
She looked up and shook her head once, her eyes never leaving his.
He nodded then turned from her stare. He was actually glad for her decisiveness and her decision, still deeply rattled himself—not only by the storm but also by his lack of preparation or awareness of danger.
They cleaned their dishes and gathered up their meager possessions and loaded them into the van. Zach used the small fireplace shovel to scoop the ashes out of the cookstove. He tossed them out the door and watched the wind carry them away. He reloaded the woodbox with branches and sticks he’d gathered from around the clearing the day before. Allison dusted the shelves and swept out the wagon. Zach filled in their potty hole with the shovel, then rinsed off their toilet-seat bucket with what remained of the soapy dish water. He left the bucket tucked under the front axle of the wagon, a token of civilization for the next occupants.
Allison waited in the passenger seat reading a magazine. Zach looked around the camp. He saw no obvious sign of their five-day stay. He didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing then realized it was just the way it was out here. It w
ould take a lot more than what he and Allison had wagered to leave a mark on this place. Maybe one day they’d return to try again.
The End
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