3.15

I remember looking up from the grueling chore of paddling your broken boat, Weston, and seeing the storm rolling in over the lake. I mean, we all three knew the rain was coming, but we hadn't seen such a thing perhaps in all our lives, and we stopped paddling and stopped counting minutes and stopped worrying about getting out as the whiplash cloud thrust the air aside and broke upon our small piece of sky with increasing apparent speed. There were occlusions in the cloud that caught different aspects of light, and I'm sure you remember that. You pulled out your phone, used the last four percent of battery to record the screaming wind and the static ripple-edge of the cloud. Your pitiful camera would never be able to capture the deep magnetic purples of the cloud's interior world, the cracked and porous grays of the adjusting space at the edge where the water droplets formed a clean line with the outside world, a wall against invaders. And then everything turned to water as the assault of the sky began. We thrust the boat hard to starboard, paddled with everything we had, and lost a quarter of a mile of hard-driven progress just making it back to land. And I remember looking up from the rush of blood in my ears and seeing nothing.

[I wrote this yesterday and just . . . forgot to publish it.]