Reigning in time
By T. W. Burger
It was the rainstorm that started it. Almost 40 years peeled away in a peal of thunder.
We were driving west, my friend and I, just to the east of the mountain named Tuscarora. The sky behind the granite bulk rose forbiddingly black.
"It looks like we might get some weather, " I said.
We plowed through the tunnel at 60; framed in the exit was air that looked like a wall of steel. The brake lights lit up on every car and truck that hit that wall; most of them, I could see, pulled off the road.
I did, too, tucking myself in between a Taurus station wagon and a motor home.
The storm was a humdinger, one of those Deluxe models that Mother Nature brings out of her knapsack every so often just to show what she can do when she sets her mind to it.
The last time I saw that much water, there were fish in it.
At high speed, with the car parked, the wipers could not keep up with the deluge. Lightning crashed almost continuously, trees danced as though in a frenzy to tear themselves loose and dance the roads of the world, their roots clattering on the concrete.
Briefly, I opened the window and looked up; so heavy was the rain that in places it had mass; huge, shadowy shapes sweeping down from the deep, brooding gray of the skies, to dash themselves to mist on the highway, on the granite abutments, on the glimmering, jewel-like autos and the behemoth trucks.
The van shuddered like a spooked horse. I half expected it to bolt and run.
That's when time slipped. I was suddenly small again, maybe five or six, hunkered into a corner of my aunt's front porch in western Pennsylvania, while just such a storm strutted a war dance down the elm- and sycamore-lined streets.
My bones jumped to the thunder, and only the calm of the adults on the porch kept me from fleeing to the stifling safety of the living room.
I remember the storm passing, and the old men in their white T-shirts and their magnificent bellies stepping off the porch into the suddenly cooled yard. They talked in their deep rumbly voices, cigarettes arcing like meteors, perfuming the air, as they talked about steel mills, baseball, and fishing.
I thought them the very lords of creation and wanted to be like them, to stand in the tossing summer night, tall as trees and wreathed in smoke, learned in the mysteries and able to augur with biting sarcasm the fate of the pennant that year.
I am older than any of them were then, knowing not much about steel mills or baseball or fishing, but with a respectable belly of my own.
A sudden gust of wind rocked the van, and I was back in the present, a long way from where I needed to be and stuck in opaque weather. The trees gestured, road signs danced like dervishes, and it rained like the end of the world.
After about 20 minutes, the storm backed off on the throttle, slowed to about what one expects a normal summer thundershower to be. The roadway and shoulder lay festooned with leaf tips and twigs, so the roadway took on a greenish tint, as though it had mildewed; it was as if the storm had run a comb through the forest, ripping out anything loose it could find.
The Taurus eased back out into traffic, as did the ungainly motor home behind. I pushed in the clutch and released the hand brake. Time to rejoin the stream.
"I wonder who will take the pennant this year?" I asked.
T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,
He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.
