Be your own palace

November is thunderstorm month. Every morning begins picture-perfect blue. It's impossible to see where clouds may be lurking. The rays of the sun reach everybody uninterrupted. It is a day in spring but very hot.

A clue to the day ahead lies with the birds if one cares to listen. There's an urgency to their twittering. It's going to be a short work day for them. Worms are going to be on the gallop. Either that or they (the worms) are going to remain underground until mid-afternoon at least when the sky paints itself a different shade and the birds have returned to their nests hungry.

The transition is swift sometimes. Near darkness at noon, as though the lights have dimmed at a theatre prior to the curtain going up, for there is a thunderous clap followed by several more rounds of applause while lightning sketches graphic forks across the sky.

Then, the deluge.

The ferocity can be intimidating, especially if one is motoring between points. It is heightened that much more if a gale blows in threatening to sweep everything aside. That's when it's difficult to decide whether it's safer to be on the road or pulled over on the side near a tree — for there are forested areas in Sydney — waiting for things to subside.

One couple did exactly this and miraculously lived to find that their intended ‘safe haven' could actually have been ‘their final resting place'.

A javelin-shaped branch from a tree sheared off and, propelled by the mighty wind, smashed right through the windscreen, scorching a pathway exactly between the two of them as a spear would, before sticking into the middle of the backseat. The irony is that, with no windscreen they were thereafter condemned to holding their breath and waiting exactly where they were till the storm passed.

Storms elicit different responses.

There are those — fully grown men — who will cower and literally cover up. An old friend of the family — a man at that time of considerable musculature and feared among his peers for his physical prowess — used to take to bed at the merest hint of thunder and lightning and wrap up in a quilt from head to toe till it was safe to emerge.

It was, as one of his buddies of that time quipped, his one concession to a force stronger than himself. For how humbled indeed are we in the face of an angered Mother Nature?

My father, who was slim and wiry all his life, and bore the physique that would have excused him had he ducked for cover during a thunderstorm, was actually impervious to both thunder and lightning. He looked up at the skies and marvelled about how little we know of the magnificence of things.

Others still lie in wait all planned, prepared and ready, for the first storms. These are the storm-chasers, children of the hurricane, the world's greatest adventurists and thrill-seekers. The stories they have to tell are astonishing. The bid to locate the ‘eye' of the storm, that area of peace; the dancing-with-death experience; travelling through a barrage of hail; photographing the majesty of cumulonimbus formations. Benjamin Franklin loved to conduct his experiments during severe storms.

Ian, a friend of a friend, is off to America when their hurricane season comes around. He's been saving towards such a trip. It's been a childhood obsession. He's had to battle family and friends who have advised against it. He's spent years being upset and lugging guilty baggage around for going against the wishes of his elders. He's just 25.

But as he says, it's how you feel about yourself that matters: You have to be your own palace, or the world is your jail.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.