About Bicycling and Rain

Thunderstorms don't frighten me anymore. I'm not sure when it happened. I suppose it was a slow, inevitable process. Sometime throughout my years in Kansas they must have stopped seeming threatening and turned into something normal, second-nature, even a little comforting.

The first Kansas storm that I witnessed, back in the summer of 2007, was a complete shock to me. Let me tell you, I thought I knew thunderstorms, but I had no idea what they were capable of. The storms I experienced growing up on the coast of Maine were so much more subdued, if you can imagine a storm being described as such. The thunder is muffled, the lightning seems always to be somewhere else, though that didn't stop me from harboring an irrational fear as a child that if I so much as stepped out the door during a storm, I would instantly become the target for the next bolt of lightning.

So, I wasn't prepared, during that raucous thunderstorm back in 2007, for the golf ball-size hail, for the winds that knocked fully-intact branches from trees, for that clap of thunder that sent my heart leaping for cover and that burned my poor, unsuspecting ear drums. As you can imagine, my irrational fear was amplified. The landscape of the Flint Hills allowed me to see everything that was happening in the sky. Skeletal bolts of lightning leapt out of boiling clouds right in front of my eyes! It was so real, so immediate. Good Lord, I wouldn't even stand a chance out there!

Yes, the thunderstorms here are amazing and bizarre, and in that first year or so of my living in Kansas, they were also kind of terrifying. Yet, as often happens over time, I grew acclimated to them, and perhaps even a little impervious. They became so normal that I forgot to pay them the awe and fascination they are due...that is, until today, when I was pretty much forced to.

For the past week, I have been putting off going to the store to get some essentials that I was running rather low on (soap, shampoo, etc). It has been so STINKING hot that nothing sounded worse to me than riding my bicycle in the blazing heat, sweat sticking to my back, only to fill up my bag with heavy objects and do it all over again. Yuck.

But I finally dragged my butt out the door, and not two seconds after pulling my bike from the garage, I heard thunder. Upon looking up at the sky, it was confirmed: a storm was definitely rolling in. To the east was blue sky, but to the west a gray mass slowly moved overhead.

Had it been a few years earlier, I would have said to heck with biking anywhere, but I had the sense that this wasn't going to be too serious. What was a little thunder and rain? What was a lightning bolt here and there? I shrugged and hopped on my bicycle, hoping to at least arrive at Walgreens before the downpour began. Lucky for me, I made it just in time; an insistent sprinkle began to fall as I pedaled into the parking lot.

So I shopped around and got what I needed and, sure enough, when I stepped back out of the sliding doors, rain was falling in sheets. It was an entirely different world than the one I had left only ten minutes earlier. I sat on a lonely bench underneath the awning and watched as people ran from the shelter of their cars and into the store, back and forth, back and forth, scuttling across the sopping pavement. And the rain, how it bounced off car roofs and pounded on flimsy umbrellas.

When it finally died down a little, I took off for home, and instantly began considering the benefits of fenders. You see, in a matter of seconds, my back, legs, and shorts were drenched in muddy water that was rapidly flying off of the tires. And then another burst of rain came from the clouds, and before I knew it, I was dripping from head to toe.

In truth, I was pretty annoyed. I was soaked and dirty and people were speeding by in their convenient little cars, spraying me mercilessly, and blah blah blah, woe is me...and that's when I looked up at the sky. Ah, the sky. Abruptly, my inner monologue of complaints went hush. The sky was doing all sorts of weird things. Half of its vast expanse was gloomy and dark, and the other half was a powdery blue, with fluffy clouds and sun peering down, and on the ground trees glistened, and then the thunder rumbled and rolled around like some majestic beast. And just like that, I never wanted the bicycle ride to end, no matter if my cell phone was ruined or not, no matter if my clothes became so overwhelmed with mud that they would never be wearable again. The rain suddenly felt wonderfully silly, skating down my arms and dripping from my forehead. I wanted to laugh, but there was nobody to share it with.

Oh, of all the things I worried about on a daily basis, how I rushed to and fro so easily overlooking moments like these, and all the stunning sounds and smells they were filled with. But at that precise moment, there I was, living and active, quite marvelously awake.

So I listened to the thunder and I tasted the rain and for a little while thought of nothing else.