I have seen three amazing electrical storms in my life. The first was when I was driving home from freshman year in college. I was attending school in Denver and my roommate and I were headed home and crossing Nebraska. It was night and for about 5 hours we drove through a powerful storm. Each strike was like a giant light going off that lit the flat landscape around us for miles in every direction. The second memorable storm was in northern Spain. Melanie and I were staying at a small pension in the mountains when that one hit. The thing I remember most about that one was the amount of electricity in the air. You could literally feel it in you body. Probably like seeing Barry Manilow live in Vegas.
The third storm happened a few weeks ago and I watched it right from my living room. It had been a hot day with temperatures hovering around 103 degrees. I was sitting in a bookstore when things started to change outside. The skies darkened, the wind picked up and the rain started to fall. In a matter of minutes the temperature dropped to 63 degrees and during the ten mile ride back to my house I watched the thermostat in my car bounce between the 60's and the 80's at least five times. At home I cracked open a beer and plopped in my favorite tv chair to watch the show. Over the next three hours I watched at least 150 lightening strikes on the ridge across the canyon from where my house sits. Huge, wildly shaped bolts that tore through the sky vertically, horizontally and diagonally. Then the sky turned yellow and the wind started to gust. I expected to see Dorothy fly by but, instead, hundreds of birds in groups of twenty or thirty bounced by the window riding the wild air currents. A brilliant rainbow than appeared shooting straight into the sky as a few remaining bolts of lightening hit around its base.
Caveman TV. Reality TV. Call it what you want, it was almost as good as America's Got Talent.
