Preview - Through A Country Window by Eric E. Wright

The crash of thunder woke me from a deep sleep. Flashes of lightning lit up the darkness. Rain pounded on the roof. I turned over and tried to go back to sleep. No use. Thunderous echoes and dazzling flashes filled the room. Slipping out of bed I checked the windows on the upper floor. Then I unplugged the computer in my office and the microwave in the kitchen before slipping into the living room to watch the spectacle through the picture window.

Streaks of lightning lit up the countryside. I could clearly see the forest half a mile away. Thunder rumbled and crashed and reverberated through the hills. The torrents of rain beating on the roof sounded like the cadences of a drummer beating out a tattoo. The rhythm of rain rose and fell with the gusts of wind that drove it, sometimes flinging itself almost horizontally across the awakened land. I seemed to be immersed in some primeval concert from the dawn of creation. Something like that which moved Haydn to write:

Mary Helen joined me as I moved to the front door. Slipping outside, we stood engulfed in the storm, though sheltered under the wide overhang of the roof. Splashes of wind driven rain wet our upturned faces and washed our extended hands. Rain pelted the flowers and pounded on the road. A flood poured through the downspouts and cascaded off the roof as the volume of water overwhelmed the eavestroughs. The driveway became a river and every flowerbed a pond.

Several years ago when I wrote this, we had been enduring a hot, dry summer. The lawn was sere. The roadways were fringed in funereal brown. Corn in the field across the road looked stunted. The dirt in the flower-beds had turned to a powder that repelled my feeble attempts at watering. Concern was expressed about fire igniting the pine forests stretching west from our house. The Ganaraska River had shrunk into a wizened snake slithering through the bottomlands. Tonight, it would sing its rebirth as it became fat and full. And the thirsty land would turn green again.

We felt like dancing a jig. "Isn't this glorious?" Mary Helen exclaimed.

We love storms. Not for us the choreographed terror of the roller coaster. Or even a great display of fireworks. Oh, we appreciate human expertise, but there is nothing like watching towering cumulo-nimbus clouds gallop across the sky

As we watched the rain create a pond on our front lawn, we reflected on the marvel that is the Creator's water cycle. Our puny attempts all summer to water the flowers seemed laughable, compared to the deluge falling in a few minutes from these clouds, clouds that towered ten miles into the air. Someone driven by statistics more than poetry has calculated that where rainfall falls at a rate of 24 inches per year, everyone receives 407,510 gallons of free water per acre!

Astonishing to realize that all this water is collected and transported around the earth without benefit of pumps to move it, or fires to evaporate it, or refrigeration to condense it. Some years ago a Canadian physicist at the University of Alberta wrote, "A rain of four inches over an area of approximately 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640,000,000 tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain. To cool again the vapours thus produced and cause it to condense into clouds would require another 800,000,000 horsepower of refrigeration working day and night for one hundred days in order to produce rainfall equivalent to that mentioned."4

This calculation only applies to 10,000 square miles. Ontario has 412,579 square miles, 41 times that amount of land and an average annual rainfall of between 25 and 36 inches. We find it hard to be blasé about summer storms.

Trying to imagine the amount of electrical energy loosed by the lightning flashes that we saw illuminating the night, increased our awe. A man in Massachusetts estimated that the electrical power required for one unusual display he witnessed was equivalent to one hundred million kilowatts, the equivalent of all the power generated in the U.S. at that time. 5

Another writer has estimated that, "There are 1800 storms in operation at one time with about 100 flashes per second. The energy expended in these storms amounts to the almost inconceivable figure of 1,300,000,000 horsepower." 6

We have revelled in the power of monsoon storms in the Himalayas and watched dust storms in the Sindh darken the sky at noonday. Still we don't take them for granted. A lightning strike several years ago fried my computer and our microwave. But since we are "bombarded by 16 million thunderstorms and two billion gallons of rain each year," 7 we may as well learn to appreciate them. And so when one rolls over the hills as it did tonight, we take a ringside seat and settle down to watch one of God's great spectacles.

"How great is God-beyond our understanding!
The number of his years is past finding out.
He draws up the drops of water,
which distil as rain to the streams;
the clouds pour down their moisture
and abundant showers fall on mankind.

Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds,
how he thunders from his pavilion?
See how he scatters his lightning about him,
bathing the depths of the sea.

This is the way he governs the nations
and provides food in abundance.
He fills his hands with lightning
and commands it to strike its mark.
His thunder announces the coming storm;
even the cattle make known its approach.

Listen! Listen to the roar of his voice,
to the rumbling that comes from his mouth.
He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven
and sends it to the ends of the earth.
After that comes the sound of his roar;
He thunders with his majestic voice." 8