THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 12, 1995 TAG: 9507120384
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Summer thunder woke me at 5 a.m. Way off, to the northwest, just a faint clearing of the throat, at first, barely identifiable as thunder.
Then there was a brief flare at the drawn blinds, a calling card.
The storm was moving southeast at 25 miles an hour. It was grumbling, talking to itself, working up a rage as it advanced. Then came a protracted rumbling, a barrel of rocks tumbling down a bumpy draw.
I got up in the dark. The Lab at the foot of the bed thumped his tail to let me know he was well aware of what was going on. He'd had a long run after midnight.
Rain pattered on two skylights, each 4 feet long, 3 feet wide, in the roof of the sunroom across the front of the house.
Its three sides, extruding from the much older house, are walled floor to ceiling with windows, done to order for one who loved light.
Outside in the dark I picked up the newspaper amid splattering rain. Would you believe there was no difficulty whatever in moving in and out between the big fat drops without getting wet?
I thought not.
As I regained the door, there was a booming crack, a thunder clap saying: ``IN, SIR!'' No more funny stuff. I jumped at its command.
Stretched on the floor in the dark, head propped on a pillow, I looked up through the skylight into the branches of a towering maple.
In the canter of the leafy canopy of interlacing limbs and overlapping leaves was an irregular 10-foot void with half a dozen smaller gaps scattered about it. The pattern seemed a rigid iron grid.
The Lab came in, lay on the floor, thrust his back against my right side, his head on my upper arm and went back to sleep.
The grid in the tree top began to stir, first the leaves, then the branches, tossed by onrushing gusts. As the storm neared, the sky filled with nearly perpetual lightning and the air with robust thunder, a constant cannonading.
In the lurid glare I could read the Pilot's banner headline flickering on page one: CLINTON WILL RESTORE TIES TO VIETNAM.
Now the branches overhead, lashed and shaken, lost any semblance of a pattern.
At times the wind swept the branches out of sight of the skylight and filled all the windows with falling leaves. At the storm's pitch, heaving around us and overhead, we seemed to be moving with it.
At moments, in its grip, you feel impelled to go and touch someone near and say, ``Come and see and hear!'' It should be shared.
Even waning, it would turn and charge with a rising roar, the black-maned lion wheeling for a last rattling rush at trainer Clyde Beatty. Gradually the storm withdrew, sound and fury subsiding as it made its way through Southside Virginia and into North Carolina until at last, barely identifiable as thunder, it was but a distant whisper. by CNB