Jun 08, 2008 - 23:40:31 CDT
The rains of the past week have been modest, but for the moment, at least, they have changed the face of North Dakota. They also have put smiles on people’s faces. The prospect of a summer wherein the grass never greens up, in which the plains start out yellow and wind up tan-gray was making me — and everyone else — fretful. Flying back into the state in May, I looked down every time on the rolling plains of North Dakota and saw a tawny grassland with widely scattered patches of dull green, mere hints of a stalled spring. It should have been Ireland green in the second half of May. We landed one evening in gale-force winds. My friend Jim took me out for supper. “Everyone’s grumpy,” he said. “The whole state’s grumpy. We’re tired of the wind.” We ate quickly and without much pleasure.
Since then, we’ve had a little relief. You can see it in people’s eyes.
It’s still windy and it’s still fundamentally dry, dry to the point that the U.S. Forest Service has ordered grazing cuts in the Little Missouri National Grasslands, but the modest rains we’ve had have brushed a patina of green over the land. Everyone is grateful and now hopeful, though not quite free of anxiety. Keep it coming — maybe a three-day soaker.
We live in a semi-arid place. Like it or not, this is the norm.
I went out for a long walk the other night and got caught in the best rain of the year so far. It had been a bright and clear, but windy, afternoon. By the time I got into walking shoes and found a book, a storm front had moved in out of nowhere. It was only 6 o’clock but it suddenly felt like dusk.
I love that. If you live in North Dakota, you perforce have a relationship with the sky. Think of the American Indians who lived here, but essentially lived here outside. No wonder they were so spiritually alive.
The front edge of the vast cloudbank hovered over the Missouri River between Bismarck and Mandan. Sudden gusts of violent wind scattered loose papers on my dining room table. I thought of taking a slicker, but I reckoned it was a front without any moisture in it, and that the rain would be measured in mere hundredths.
I was wrong.
By the time I had walked half a mile, the raindrops had begun to assemble into clusters. The individual drops were dense and cold and hard, as if they really would have rathered be hail, and they began to penetrate through my work shirt onto my skin. Turn back? No way. I felt the chill, but it was in that wonderful borderland between agreeable and disagreeable. It seemed wrong to yearn for rain and then to be turned back at the first sign of deliverance.
When you live in dry country, getting soaked can be a satisfying experience. At first the rain was so half-hearted that I reckoned the evaporation rate would keep up. Not so. My shirt got wetter and heavier and it began to cling to my skin. Rivulets began to run their traceries down my face and blear my eyes. I could feel myself smiling, a rain dope. Huge drops hit the walking path and bounced a little, carrying up a little detonation of dust. Suddenly, the sky had an aroma — that magical smell of life and renewal and clarity. I walked by a lilac bush and took a deep breath. It’s enough to make you almost faint to smell the lilacs at full bloom.
Then the lightning came. The sky had been rumbling in a distant kettledrum sort of way, and the thunderheads had lit up like cartoon clouds, but it had all been heat lighting until now. Now, suddenly, classical streaks of vicious zig zag lightning hurtled from heaven to earth, and split the whole sky in the aftermath. I counted the seconds between lightning and the appalling crack of thunder — thunder that began slowly as if the sky gods were unzipping the heavens and grew to an explosive crescendo that makes you actually jump from the ground.
Perfection of nature! We live on so interesting a planet. Imagine a planet without dramatic weather. What would be the fun of that?
You find yourself doing a bit of probability analysis in such situations, assuring yourself that the chances of being struck by lightning are really very low. You inspect the soles of your shoes and try to determine whether plastic or leather is the superior insulator. You walk more deliberately, picking up your feet to make sure you are not shuffling up static electricity.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be struck by lightning. We’ve all read stories about individuals who have been struck — a few of them repeatedly through life as if their body chemistry somehow made them human lightning rods. Would it blow off my toenails? Would it weld the pen in my breast pocket to my ribs? Would I bear a zig zag stigmata down my back for the rest of my life like Harry Potter? Would I suddenly start receiving FM radio and, if so, could I choose NPR rather than rap or acid rock? Would I be split open like an over-cooked bratwurst and left to smolder through the night?
There have been times, later in the summer, out in the Little Missouri River country, when I was literally the highest object on the landscape. In the worst (actually, best) thunderstorm I ever experienced, I was so frightened that I threw myself face down on the plains grass in a kind of hollow and felt that even then I was the highest object on the landscape. On that occasion, and a few others, I believed it quite likely that I would be killed. That’s not a very comforting experience, and yet there is an exhilaration in it too, a heightening of consciousness and a presence that we seldom achieve as we go through the motions of life.
Last week’s lightning spared me for another time. When I got home, I stripped my clothes off in the entryway like a summer child, took a long, long hot shower, and discarded my sodden book.
There are lots of books.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)
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