Storm!

Storm!

Posted on 27 Jul, 2008 8 comments

Storm can be different in different places. When I read Raquel’s blog on “sheets of rain” I could relate to that immediately. I miss those real storms, funny really. Darwin is the place on earth with the most severe thunderstorms and 60.000 lightning strikes hit the area each summer. Scientist and weather freaks are each summer flogging to Darwin to follow and study the storms. They even go up in planes to look at them from different angles. At first I thought they were mad, but after my first summer I knew better, and I started to love them.
I’d be gardening after lunch in my jungle or garden beds beneath the shade of palms or native gum trees, sweating away, especially when bending down on my knees whilst my legs got sopping wet. My hair looked like I’d been swimming instead of gardening, yet, it felt so good. You’d feel the air getting heavy, clouds would move in. I would just keep on raking, weeding, pruning or gathering fallen palm fronds untill I heard the first rumble. It gets exciting then. Rumblings are warnings, but you gradually get used to them and keep going. Looking up at the sky I could see those angry clouds white against grey or grey against black or blue or whatever. These clouds move fast. They almost look like clouds coming from factory chimneys. But I can’t stare at them, I have to get my wheelbarrow full. Then it hits! A loud “CRACCCKKK” and I know that one hits the ground. Well, perhaps it is time to move to the veranda. From there I could observe this spectacle. Lightning flashes here and there, followed by a few drops. Then it suddenly with great force buckets down. Not many people have gutters there, as there is no use for them, they’d overflow in no time. We could easily get one inch in half an hour. I could see the bottom of the property filling rapidly with water. The thunder continues, but moves on quickly, leaving the rain behind. But mostly after one or two hours it stops as sudden as it started. And that soil is gravelly there, so the water quickly disappears in the ground. This all happens the next day all over again. Sometimes it rains more during the night. One night the lightning crack, and I say crack as it crackles whilst coming down, was quite close. We were in bed, the dogs hiding behind the toilet and under the bed, quivering, poor things. I was sure it hit the house. I hid under the sheet….Well, it didn’t but it hit the shed, disabling the electronic irrigation system, even when we had pulled out the whole system, not needing it in summer. That was costly, we had to have it repaired. Another time it hit the pump at the bore, so we had no water until repaired. Then one afternoon I was on the computer peacefully typing away ( I have safety devices, but I still close off everything when the storms hit ). There was no warning, no rumbling, perhaps a bit darker outside, when “BLAST-BANG” a crack so close, it made me and the dogs startle. I quickly closed the network, phoneline etc. and went to the back veranda to investigate. All I could see was one branch of the Woolly butt on the ground. It started to rain. After it stopped hubby and I went into the garden and behind those trees, palms and woolly butt, we saw a ditch dug into the lawn, about1.60m long and 15 cm deep, grass clumps thrown about. “Is that all?”, I wondered. It had just stopped short of the pool. But the next day I noticed the ivy climber on the tree trunk was scorched, turning brown. Then slowly days and weeks later we saw branches of that tree and the surrounding Rumphiana caryota palms all turning brown. And in the middle of my jungle behind it were all smaller branches from the top of the tree. The lightning had hit the tree and had blown the top outof it. It had burned the trunk and the adjacent palms, then dug a trench in the garden. Phewww, I was lucky none of us were just there when it happened.
Another worse storm followed later that season. I will tell you about that next time.

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