Indian Ocean Tsunami and Storm

Things get weird the night after the wave

          Strange storm coming           Static reaches the camera from nearby bolt           Bigger, closer, but still no thunder           Getting worried           Refuge in the vehicle           Rivermouth Arabesque           Bright as day           White skyfire...           ...fades...           ...to reveal the bearer Strange storm coming

The hour before midnight, the night after the world tipped, the four of us were riding in the car, amazed and as excited as kids on the Christmas Eve just passed.

As we slipped through the livid darkness by the cemetery the horizon to the north began to strobe. Wide sheets of dirty yellow billowed in the sky, embroidered with electric silver thread...

All that evening we'd watched the sky congeal. The first humid clottings appeared as the full moon rose into the midsummer sky. By nine, the stars and moon had vanished, overwhelmed by pearly masses now joined by a deeper darkness reaching for us from the north. The storm was strange from the first: It took so long to build. Hours after the usual summer storm would have cracked, pelted and melted back to sparkling stars, this one crawled and brooded and held its breath. The watchers' televisions snowed and hissed the voice of the darkness bearing down on us while far off to the west, north and east nodes of static discharge flashed warnings.

By eleven we were surrounded and besieged. My three compatriots had been out walking while I worked and had returned with the news that the lightning was now very close. I walked into the hot damp hush of the night and stood at the end of the driveway. The arc of probing bolts released over the next few minutes indeed seemed close by but strangely, we were yet to hear the lightning's thunder. I thought that meant it must still be at some distance. Thought too, that so slow moving a storm would perhaps make it worth the drive to a vantage point from where I might again attempt that elusive perfect lightning shot.

"Wanna go down the coast and check it out?" I wondered...

"Hell yeah!" they chorused. We piled into the car and headed west.

By the time we pulled into the lookout over the river it was upon us. Our headlights swept several other cars in the parking bay, their passengers disgorged in tight knots, huddled witness to the maelstrom overhead. As we doused the lights and spilled out into the night the wind hit us. Out of the calm it blasted as sudden as the lightning overhead. Dry, harsh and charged, it scoured the brittle detritus of summer from the valley below and hurled it into our faces.

As I struggled to mount the camera on the tripod a triple assault of net and trident was launched west, north and east. Much, much closer this time. To the west, a clear bolt lanced the ocean off the rivermouth while northward across the river valley the entire horizon strobed again with yellow, joined within the cloud to the more distant blue blaze in the east. And still the only sound was that of the wind. That gritty gale increased in intensity and began to buffet and whip. More lightning scored the lowering sky as I continued fumbling with the tripod.

Suddenly, there came a light tapping on my right breast, then a sharp and spidery scuttle from breast to neck, across my face and up to the crown of my head. I swiped, dancing and yelling "What's on me!?!"

Before anyone could answer came another blinding flash. Simultaneous lightning and realisation: Gripping the metal of the tripod, I'd been scoped by static! Searched by the fingers of the storm as they clawed for purchase on the charged hillside!

Placing the camera between myself and the world, limiting my attention to the viewfinder's field, trying to "take" photographs, I felt I'd almost been taken myself. So warned, I tossed the tripod back in the car and opened myself to the wild night. Trying now to give at least as much as I was attempting to take, I switched the camera to video mode, held it at arm's length and gave my attention to the sky. Let heaven show each of us what it would...

We stood, awestruck, and the rain came. Hot wet tears that like those of grief, were at first restrained. Shed sparingly, they fell far enough apart that we could walk between them, able to choose whether or not we would accept their liquid message. The next explosive breath of the storm was a release that forbade choice. The rain drove hard into the carpark, splattering awareness of the storm's proximity over the few of us remaining outside our vehicles. Again and again our eyes were seared by the energies flashing between earth and sky, but our ears heard nothing but the wind and rain.

I abandoned all thought of photography then and joined my companions back in the car, seeking shelter from the now stinging rain. The excitement we'd felt on the ride out to this place had been amplified to near hysteria by the storm's electricity and as the lightning drew nearer and encircled us, all talk was of its silent mystery.

Chattering over the top of each other, we wondered aloud how it could be that we could see the bolts strike the earth, apparently not more than a kilometer or two away, and yet hear no thunder. Those wide blue bolts emphasised their power by instantly robbing us of sight, leaving retinal ghosts howling danger to our senses, but never hammered home that message with the concussive blasts our experience demanded should be there.

While we debated the perception and reality of distance, wide-eyed attention snapping between each other and the crescendo building outside, the jaundiced eyes of other vehicles' headlights pierced the night as they wheeled and fled the approaching stormfront. Some directly to the east, others circling and falling away westward until there was just ours and one other. Our talk by then had turned to the safety or otherwise of our metal-shelled hillside refuge.

Peering through the rain smeared windscreen into the northern darkness, I beheld another titanic discharge to the hill on the other side of the valley. In the stuttering echoes of light that followed the initial detonation I beheld an ominous black gyre apparently descending on that hilltop. The pendulous gatherings of the underside of the cloud stretched and spiraled about the lightning's source, reminiscent of twister, waterspout and campfire horror story. Overcome with awe and foreboding, I keyed the ignition and joined us to the hasty exodus.

Our impetus slowed as we approached the cemetery. We had fallen silent, islands of private contemplation awash in the soft green light of the dashboard instruments, splashed by the waves of blue still breaking in the sky outside.

Our unspoken thoughts converged: "Shall we go back?" I ventured...

"Yeah!"

"Maybe to the beach?"

"I don't know why we had to leave in the first place!"

Our headlights glanced over tombstone and cross as we turned again to the west. Passing our former lookout we noted the lone and darkened utility vehicle remaining. It rocked slightly on its springs as it was harried by the wind, its canvas tray cover snapping in the gale, an apparition now, a midnight ghost ship adrift in the face of that ominous northern horizon, abandoned beneath the constant lightning now aflicker in the cloud directly overhead.

As we rolled toward the hill from which the road swooped down to the rivermouth, lightning blazed directly in front of us. Joining sea and sky, it was yet wider, longer and closer than all its predecessors. Blinded again, I stabbed at the brakes as we all yelled in shock. It seemed portentous. A message that we would find no shelter here, that the valley was just as much the preserve of the storm as the exposed hillside we'd deserted. Nonetheless, we were committed - responding to a heartfelt summons to bear witness to the fitful fluxes raging between heaven and earth. It was well after midnight when we left the car for the second time.

The asphalt underfoot was still warm from the heat of the day as we ventured out. The hills of the river valley rose above us to the north and south, imparting the perception of security, even though the storm now seemed stalled directly above us. The rain had abated and the valley afforded protection from the full strength of the wind, but the sky overhead still roiled. The light of the full moon flowed by unseen pathways in the cloud to give shape to the underside of the storm - multiple suspended lobes of midnight mauve sculpted and revealed by the opalescent glow of transmitted moonlight.

Then again the lightning! The short respite as we entered the carpark suddenly felt designed to entice us from the vehicle so we could again be assailed. Still silent, the lightning now scribed the sky in fantastic fashion. Initial sheets of light would unfurl within the cloud, then suddenly break free in questing filaments of blue that spread weblike across the underside of the cloud. Repeated in cyclic variation, the display rendered a cerebral sky, a neural network made visible, the appearance of lobe and electric webwork tracery like watching the mechanics of thought.

Lightning like none of us had ever seen:

Paired parallel bolts, left and right mirror images, darted from cloud to ground, to be instantly answered by discharge from earth to air springing from a point midway between the landing twins. They were a cosmic call and response, a shout of event and echo, proclaiming departure and return.

Lightning that would exit the cloudbase in sharp downward angles, arrowing toward earth, then suddenly turn and become a looping horizontal skein of filigree and spot. It was Arabic script ablaze in the darkness, a cursive electricity forwarding subliminal text messages.

Sudden magnesium flares of brightest white burst from nowhere to banish the darkness. Not localised, no point of origin, not bolt or sheet or net, having no direction of travel, just the instantly blossoming brilliance of day that banished night. Revelations, cataclysms, ephemera.

The first of those incandescent explosions revealed to us that the ocean needs no cloudless daylit sky to be blue. The waters of the rivermouth bay flashed their summer palette of clear glass, aqua shallows and turquoise deepenings to the instantly blue horizon.

The second drew our attention to the tannic golden-brown water of the river's lagoon, stretched serpentine between the quartz and calcium whiteness of the beach and the green and yellow mosaic of the dune vegetation.

The third showed us the beach walkers.

"Are there people on the beach?"

"I think so..."

"Yeah - I saw them too!"

"Where have they come from?"

Ours was the only vehicle. The last one we'd seen had cruised into the carpark just before the rain stopped and had paused briefly, engine running, then reversed and sped away up the hill. My sense of foreboding returned. I'd seen what looked like people away beyond the few signs planted in the sand by the river. A couple I'd thought, heading back toward us from the point of sand at the northern end of the bay. I wasn't sure they were really there and was waiting for what the next illumination would reveal.

The rain began anew. More hot tears.

Back in the car, we waited for the next lighting of the scene before us. When it came it was accompanied by the first faint sound of thunder... and more people on the beach.

Again we were ababble with wonder.

"There's more!"

"Where are they coming from?"

"What are they doing?"

"Aren't they scared of being hit by lightning?"

We waited for each bright illumination, straining to confirm our visions. With each instant of revelation, the voice of the storm grew louder until the heavens boomed. The Indian Ocean, having heaved in nightmare the day before, had been restless in it's bed ever since - rising, retiring, rising again - but appeared serene in those stormlit instants, admonished to calm by the resonating aum of the thunder.

The white light blazed: Still more... People walking up the slope of the beach, as if leaving the water. Others in small groups, facing each other in loose circles. Always at least in pairs, none of those I saw were alone. I never saw any of them more than once as far as I could tell. They would appear with the light and be swallowed in the following dark, their position and course vacant in the next enlightenment. That subsequent light illuminated other walkers though, travellers in adjacent spaces who were following different paths.

We all saw them. The camera did not. 

They were there/not there.

They were hidden and revealed.

They were given and taken away...