Storms, here along the Wasatch Front in the summer, change things.  They have become so rare that when they do come, they sweep across our landscape like hands picking up lost children. They never last long enough to cleanse us, to give us a fresh start, like the storms did during my youth, but they come to let us know that our skies can, if pushed hard enough, give us rain.

Then they leave us to ache for another flash in the sky.

We go whole summers without them, the dry and hot air settling in the valley as if it were a squatter claiming its land and unwilling to leave.  We pray for it to leave.  The high desert cries for a drink.

Just the other night, I lay in my son's bed.  He and his mom lay in ours.  I had a big run the next morning, so I didn't want to bother everyone when I got up early to drink coffee, and eat breakfast before heading out.

A storm came.

We hadn't had our windows open for days. It was early August, and it had been 99 degrees during the day for more than a week.  A stiff air filled the house like a corpse lying immovable in a tomb.

The trees began to move outside when I lay down.  They moved just a bit at first, so I closed my eyes, crossed my hands over my chest, and tried to sleep.

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A thwapping sound managed to break through the closed sliding glass door that opens up to a deck outside my son's room.  I sat up, looked outside, and saw the limbs of our massive trees begin to sway back and forth.  And then a shot of lightning lit the sky over Great Salt Lake.  Within moments, I made my way around the home and opened any window that could be opened. I turned on all the fans and then returned to bed.

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I lay there again.  This time, sprawled out, exposing as much of my skin to the cool breeze that I could, its frequent gusts bathing me in damp air. It came in waves at first.  A hot wind.  A cool breeze.  A warm wind. A cooler breeze.  A brisk wind.  Then it stayed so cool.  And then the rain came, and wind carried its scent into the room.

I did not want to sleep.  Instead, I lay there until 1:00 AM, long after my wife and son had begun to snore together in the room across the hallway.  I thought about so many things that night just to keep myself awake, to be able to feel the cold breeze and smell the rain and live in a home that had just taken its first breath of fresh air in months.

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Lightning storms were like magic in our Utah childhood home.  During the dry summer, when the lightning came, my dad would turn off the television, turn off the lights in the living room, and open the windows that faced the Weber River. 

 

The breeze picked up and turned into a wind.  We lived at the mouth of Weber Canyon, so when the winds came, they came hard.  They rushed through our open windows and flushed out the stale air of summer. We huddled together on the couch, the four of us, and we watched the darkened skyline.  And then the show began.  Lightning lit up the hill a mile away like the graceful and powerful legs of ballet dancers, touching down and lifting and touching down again.  Moments later, thunder shook our home while we waited for an encore.  The house had been filled with the smell of a storm.  I placed my hands and arms on the back of the couch and kneeled down and leaned against its soft cushions and watched the skyline drop lightning against the night.

Sometimes rain came too.

We wouldn't go to bed or turn the television back on until the storm had passed.  The breeze would stay all night.  The windows would stay open until morning.  The next day, the house would smell new.  And yes, we would talk about the storm as if it were a new show or movie we had all watched on opening night.

In 1999, I would leave Utah to live somewhere else for the first time in m y  oung life.  I packed up my Toyota and drove across Colorado and most of Kansas.  The peaks of the Rocky Mountains faded into the dry detritus of the high plains of Wyoming, the winds covering the road behind me in a whirl of sand and heat and thin air so far above sea level.  Denver rose out of the eastern slope and then Kansas came, not like a riptide or a wave or a rush of earth that sprung out of the ground, but like the gentle feel of a morning when there is nothing on the day's agenda, a slow and peaceful rise that can only come from the vast plains of soy and wheat, corn and cattle.

That day, the day I left my hometown for the first time, I could have driven across those Kansas plains forever. I was on that first real journey, the one that would change the course of everything I would ever do from then on.  They all do.  All the big moves.  All the moves that promise no real return home to the place where we grew up. 

 

The sun sets differently in Kansas than it does in northern Utah.  It seems to take its time.  In Utah, the sun drops fast over the lake and the Oquirrh Mountains, the peaks of the mountains cutting into its bright orange roundness until they have cut it all the way through.

In Kansas, the sun does not 'drop.'  It does not 'fall.'  The plains stretch out forever toward the horizon.  The curve of the earth dips in the farthest distance. And the sun settles on the earth's subtle edge and seems to hold there for hours, the rich reds and oranges and yellows of light dripping onto the plains.

And the storms.  When I first saw a wall of clouds move across the sky, I was a newbie graduate student; I was still a child.  A new friend and I stood in a park in the center of the city of 50,000 people, most of whom were students.  We tossed a baseball back and forth.  It thwapped in our gloves, leather smacking against leather, moments of clarity and fulfillment that always come, catch after catch, when playing in an open park.

We played catch for an hour, just bullshitting about our lives before we moved to central Kansas. We talked about writers we loved while sharing our fragmented, short biographies that we believed to be so rich and full and long at the time, both of us barely nearing our mid-twenties. 

That's when the storm came.  It moved across the plains.  The sky turned a hazy green, a Kansan's telltale sign of an oncoming tornado, and then the hail came.  My friend and I ran to his car and huddled in the front seats to ride out the storm.  He cracked a beer and gave me one.  We sat there and watched the storm and listened to the radio as the tornado circled the city; we became friends, sitting in a car, watching the storm roll.

Once, while traveling back to Kansas from a long break spent in Utah, a large storm front pushed toward I-70 just past the eastern border of Colorado and the western border of Kansas. Like a wall of black night had come for me, it shot bolts of lightning toward the earth, trumpeters announcing the arrival of a powerful demigod that shook the earth.  At the edge of the storm, as if a sharp knife had cut through the clouds, leaving a nearly perfect line between the storm and the open sky, the7 bright, bright blue of a sunny, cloudless day struck a contrast so deep in color and texture that it shocked my senses.  And the black wall pushed fast against the blue sky, toward me.

Where I came from, from the Mountain West, storms do not come like this.  They follow our mountains like trail guides from the Pacific Northwest or come up through the Southwest or from California, slowly. We see them coming a long way away.  By the time storms reach Utah, the second driest state in the Union, they have long lost their battle against the high pressure of the mountains or dropped their rain in Oregon or Washington or were weakened in the deserts of Arizona and Las Vegas.

Sure, there are winds and rain and thunder and lightning.  Now, in a world that we know is getting hotter and in a time when we know a shift in the climate could take the wind and our precious dry snow from us for years, we want the storms to punch us hard in the gut of the valley.

In 2001, I left Utah again, only having spent one month there after graduating from school in Kansas, I headed to Dublin, Ireland.  In Dublin, my first night, I lay in bed in a convent just outside of Trinity College.  The building was completely silent, by rule.  The nuns hosted travelers like me who had yet to find a place to live.

I checked into the massive, old building with stone archways that bent over the stone floors, all parts of building that have stood longer than Utah has been a state, longer than the Mormon church has existed, before my Hispanic greatgrandfather crossed the Atlantic Ocean and married my Native American great-grandmother, long before any of those things that brought me here, a child in his mid-twenties who lay in his bed.

It rained hard outside my window.  I would find that this heavy rain was not a storm at all in Ireland, only a shower that came most days in the months leading up to winter. But it was a storm to me, a boy coming from a cold desert in the Rocky Mountains.  I listened to the rain pound against the window.  I doubted every decision I had ever made in my short life.  Relationships.  Family.  School.  Drug use.

I lay next to the opened window and listened to the rain hit the exterior walls.  It splashed down and puddled up on the window sill and clinked against the fire escape ladder.  It smelled so fresh, so real.  I missed home.

Mostly, I thought about the girl from Kansas I had started to date before I left for Dublin.  She is now my wife, nearly 20 years later.  As a gift, she sent me away with a folding picture frame, a small, black thing that I could carry in my pocket.  When I opened it up, I saw her face.  When I pushed a circular black button, she spoke to me through a recording.  I opened it every night before I fell asleep, multiple times, and listened to her say 'hello.'​

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Six months later, I drove back to Kansas from Utah to see the same girl who put her picture in that little frame.  A storm front moved across the plains toward my truck.  At first, I was amazed at how thick and predominant the edge of the front looked, how the defined wall of storm drew a line in the center of the vast blue sky.

When the winds picked up and began to blow my truck from side to side on the interstate, and as drivers with Kansas plates began to pull the cars beneath overpasses and put on their hazard lights, the awe of the storm remained, and the darkness moved toward us. I turned on the AM radio and scanned for weather updates.

The updates ran on repeat as I drove through small towns, one of the few cars still pushing its way through head and side and tail winds that whipped the one-ton vehicle around like a paper airplane caught in the breeze of a house fan.

I never saw the twister, never looked out my front window and saw it coming my way, but the radio, keeping everyone listening up to speed, told me that it chased me northeast toward The Little Apple.  I would pass a town sign.  The radio's voice would say that the tornado was heading toward that town.  I would pass another town sign, and the radio would warn the people there, telling them to listen for the tornado sirens and to get indoors and in their basements.

The wind pushed my Toyota back and forth across the barren road.  Huge chunks of hail slammed hard into my truck, and the storm chased me. I drove as fast as I could across the plains.  I turned off I-70 and the storm turned southwest and the winds calmed, and I waited for my girlfriend, the clouds above us just a hazy gray over bright blue.  When she finally came out, our official life together started.

Twenty years later, however, I lay in my son's bed, and the upheaval of the choices of my youth have calmed along with rising drought of my Utah home.

The cold wind comes into the room and touches all of my exposed skin.  My family sleeps so close by, their snores in asynchronous wave together.  Mom and son.  I think about storms, about rain, about wind, and watch the tree branches waving.

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