“It crashed, pulling the
tent down around him,
pinning him, trapping
him”
I
have always loved storms. There’s a flash of the
transcendent when nature turns violent.
As a child, when a brewing storm was in the air,
I would want to run out into the yard, stand in
the yellow-green other-worldly light, and hold my
breath, waiting for what I knew was coming, then
dance and whirl when the huge fat raindrops began to
fall. Even now, remembering being a kid eager in the
eerie silence before the storm, at a crack of thunder I
imagine music, want to take lessons in tribal
drumming, long to invoke and participate in the
upheaval.
My father was always careful about storms.
During my childhood, if a storm loomed while he
was at work, I could run out into the yard, raise my
arms in holy glee, and welcome the power of it into
my neighborhood, my yard, my space, my life. But if
a storm arose after Dad was home from work, or on a
weekend—well, forget it. We’d have to go down into
the basement with a transistor radio. We could play
Hearts. If it was cool enough, we could light a fire in
the basement fireplace, even roast marshmallows.
But mostly, we had to tiptoe around Dad’s anxiety
about storms, listen to weather reports, wait for him
to proclaim it safe to go back upstairs.
There was a storm in his growing up. I do not
remember a time when I did not know this story. In
his Alzheimer’s years, Dad kept coming back to it,
kept telling the story with more and more gaps. I have
come to know the gaps as much as the story.
In the story, my dad was a teenager. He and
his brother and I think an uncle or perhaps a cousin
(why didn’t I listen more carefully?) had driven up
north, had pitched tents, were camping. There was
this storm. A big storm, a violent storm, a scary storm,
while they were in tents.
A tree fell, perhaps struck by lightning. If it had
fallen a few inches over, it would have killed the young
man who in that case would not have become my
father. It crashed, pulling the tent down around him,
pinning him, trapping him. I don’t remember how
long he was trapped in his tiny tent. But he got out, >
Photograph by Tom Darin Liskey. Liskey spent nearly
a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela,
Argentina and Brazil. His first collection of stories,
This Side of The River, was published in August 2014.