...Seeking Clarity In A Murky World...

I dwell in possibility… 
— Emily Dickinson

My mother thought the best place to be during one of Southern California’s rare electrical storms was high up in Hollywood Hills, on Laurel Canyon or Mulhulland Drive, parked in one of those clearings that overlook Los Angeles. (Unfortunately, my brother thought the best place to be was under the bed, with blankets piled up to block any openings and all the curtains tightly drawn across the windows.)

Me, I had no more sense than my mother (but a better excuse, being quite young). "Let’s go for a drive!" she’d announce, and I’d eagerly pile into Priscilla (our old Fiat), along with the blankets, sandwiches, Scooter Pies, beverages and my very reluctant brother and off we’d go.

I couldn’t tell you the names of the streets, or the direction we traveled, but I recall the… sense, I guess it is, of the drives. Cities - at least that one - smell different in a new rain. The familiar smells are somehow made worse by the dampness, I suppose especially when there is just enough rain to wet, but not to clean. For some reason the sounds of the wet city fascinated us, though… my brother and I would press our faces to the windows in order to look out and especially to catch that special whoosh sound the tires of passing cars made on the wet pavement.

Soon we’d be on quieter, less traveled streets and finally the narrow, winding turns that led up into the hills. The air was smelly there too, but very different smells - dense and ... green, maybe, the smell of all the trees and brush the lights of the car would swing over as we wound our way up. I wasn’t sure I liked it much better.

Finally we’d turn into a little dirt clearing and park. And wait. If, as often happened, the storm passed us by, we’d just look at all the lights of the city and make up stories about who was down there, where the tiny headlights were going, what they were doing and what we were going to all do one day. That was fun enough, but if fortune smiled on us we really would catch the main event - the storm.

We were lucky, maybe, that we were never electrocuted nor shoved over the cliff by the strong winds - I don’t recall having any fear of that at the time but looking back, our little outings don’t strike me as a very sensible thing to do. (Then again, the older I got, the more I realized how very little of how we lived and grew up was sensible or even "normal".)

When we caught a good storm, the thunder felt like it was rattling our bones. It was worth it, though, to see the lightning strikes blazing across the sky, making even the bright city lights seem washed out and dim. I don’t know if our car was more rickety than most (probably), but the wind would shriek and the car would shake and shimmy, while we curled up with our blankets (my brother, strangely, was far less afraid of lightning storms while in the car - he had much belief in the rubber on the tires) and ohhh’d and ahhhh’d over the show being put on for us. And, too soon, the storm would pass on and the skies would clear a bit, and we’d head back home to our little apartment, to await the next adventure.