Procrastinet

I've Got the Sturm, Now Where's My God Damned Drang?!

filed under: Idle Chatter

So last Friday, I was trying to get out of the office early. We were going upstate to the Youngblood retreat, and I had to get back to Brooklyn, pick up the 15-passenger van I'd rented from an orthodox Jewish fellow way out MacDonald Avenue, go to Costco to pick up the snacks and volumes of beer and whiskey that Youngblood requires for a proper artistic retreat, and get back to EST on W. 52nd Street by 7pm to pick up the playwrights and head upstate.

To that end, I worked through lunch so that I could cut out at 4:30. I rode my scooter, which is the fastest way home - I can usually make it in about 20 minutes door-to-door.

So as I'm sitting at my desk, I see that the sky outside, especially to the west over New Jersey, has gotten ominously bruise-like. I checked my email and sure enough I had a My-Cast weather alert for a SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING.

Now, usually these warnings are of the "OH, HEY, THERE'S A STORM BY YOU; HOW ABOUT TAKING AN UMBRELLA" variety. Not this one, though. This one was of the hysterical, chicken little variety. It went something like this.

ZOMFG! DANGEROUS STORM IS RIGHT OVER YOU! LIGHTING'S GONNA KILL YOU! WINDS ARE GOING TO KNOCK YOU DOWN! HIDE INSIDE OR YOU GONNA DIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"

I may be paraphrasing a bit. But that was the basic tone. It was so overwrought that I even joked about it to the buxom, bovine secretary next to me, who doesn't seem to understand anything I say.

So I'm watching on the radar as the little blisters of blood-red severe storm bubble up over eastern New Jersey and blow straight towards the little X's on the map, one saying "Work" and the other saying "Home."

Maybe I can cut out early, thinks I. Not so fast, thinks my boss, here's a document for you to chew on, how do you like THEM apples.

So at 4:31pm I'm frantically shutting down my computer, grabbing my helmet, and dashing outside to see how it's looking.

"NUMBER ONE KILLER IN A STORM IS CLOUD-TO-GROUND LIGHTNING," goes the weather report, replaying in my head. "EXPECT CONTINUOUS CLOUD-TO-GROUND LIGHTNING IN THIS WEATHER SYSTEM."

But when I get outside, the thunder is still west of me, and the rain is light.

And I think: I don't have time to wait or take the train. I'm gonna go for it.

So I sprint to my scooter, fire it up and buzz off into the rain.

By the time I get moving, the rain is no longer light. The rain is what one would comfortably call "heavy."

By the time I get three blocks towards the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain is no longer heavy. The rain is what one would comfortably call "torrential."

"This is a bad idea," I'm beginning to think. "I should turn around," I think. "That's going to lose me a lot of time, though," I think, as I pull up to the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, "because I'll have to drive back to the motorcycle parking lot on Wall Street, THEN walk all the way up to the train (sopping wet) THEN take the train home. But I really should do it anyway, it's really raining hard right now, this probably isn't so safe."

The problem being this: in the time it took me to process all of those thoughts, I had pulled onto the on-ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn't consciously decide to do so - I actually had decided to turn around. To this day I'm not exactly sure what happened.

So now I'm driving a 50cc scooter through solid rain and about 4 inches of runoff up a ramp and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. And the lightning has arrived.

It hadn't occurred to me how seldom one is actually "out in" a big thunderstorm. It's very rare, nowadays, to be caught totally exposed in a really big storm - unless you're like a wheat farmer in Kansas or something. Suffice it to say, my Eastern Seaboard urban mindset wasn't really prepared to absorb such a thing.

So I'm buzzing steadily up the ramp onto the Bridge. I'm soaked through and my glasses are obscured, there are cars on all sides of me, the 60mph wind gusts that I was promised by the National Weather Service have started to arrive, and the lightning has really started gearing up.

Somewhere around the first big stone tower of the bridge, I looked ahead and saw a gust of wind blowing a solid white sheet of rain absolutely horizontally across the road, and the lightning starting hitting so close there was almost no delay between the flash and the splintering crack of thunder.

And I just want to point out: when you think about lighting and thunder, you think of it as something periodic, right? Sporadic, even? Nuh-uh. Not in the middle of this little number. The strikes came with metronomic regularity, spaced about one, maybe two seconds apart. And there I was, way up hundreds of yards above the East River, on a 20' wide stretch of concrete surrounded by A GIGANTIC STRUCTURE OF METAL.

It was about then that I began speaking, out loud, to God. I'm not sure what all I promised Him in exchange if he just got me down the other side of that bridge unfried, but I think it was pretty extensive.

Whatever it is, I clearly owe it to Him now, because here I am, safe and dry. My little scootch, a valiant Kymco People 50 which I had never even ridden through a moderate drizzle before, never wavered - even while driving through 60mph side winds and up to 6" of runoff and puddle.

And by sometime the next day, I had even stopped shaking.

Posted by rjt at July 26, 2006 12:30 PM