It had been hot for weeks. Hot and dry. Adam Kepke had seen 68 summers, but he could
only bring about 60 of those to mind and of those, he couldn’t remember more
than five that weren’t hot and dry. He lived in southwestern Iowa and that’s
the way summers were. But that didn’t keep it from being the number one topic
of conversation, every single year. That was OK with Adam, it kept things
simple and simple was comfortable.
Adam kept his life pretty simple. He'd never married and didn't
know why. It just hadn't happened. He didn't pay much attention to the world
outside himself, he never had, and where he lived, in the town of Slipperyrock,
Iowa, that was considered a virtue.
Adam wasn't a hermit. He attended church most Sundays, went to the
store, and to the diner to eat on occasion. He used to work every day, spent
most of his life working at the Tyler’s heavy equipment repair just outside of
town. He'd worked mostly on farm equipment but he could fix a car and even appliances,
if he wanted to. He'd always been handy and had been a machinist mate shop mechanic,
the rating called MMS, while in the Navy. He'd been in the landlocked navy,
never at sea or on boats. Adam enjoyed working on machinery.
He'd gotten hurt when a full-sized tractor had slipped just enough
on a set of big jack-stands to break his right shoulder, badly. It happened at lunch
time and he waited under the tractor for 20 minutes for his buddy, Jeff, to get
back from the diner and jack the tractor up off him. Jeff drove him to the
nearest hospital in Red Oak, 30 minutes south. They gave him something for pain
and sent him by ambulance to Omaha, Nebraska another 30 miles northeast. Adam was
awake and quiet throughout the whole affair.
They fixed his shoulder best they could, but it was never as good
as before and it'd pop out of its socket if he put any real load on it, so he
could no longer work at the shop. That's how he came to retire at the age of
65. Adam missed working on machinery.
He spent most of these hot days in the rocking chair on his front
porch. He didn't read books, he didn't listen to the radio, just rocked. Once
in a while, somebody walked by on their way uptown, kids rode their bikes
around, the occasional car passed by. Mostly it was quiet and Adam rocked.
He held a small woven palm-leaf fan on a flat stick that he waved
by his face to create a little breeze. The fan was the type common in the old
days before air conditioning and electric fans and they used to be placed in
the hymnal holders on the backs of the pews in church to use during the
service. It was common for funeral homes to stencil their names on the flat part
to advertise. The fans worked well as a personal cooling device, even when the
power was out. Adam's fan used to have a name stenciled on it but it had worn
off long ago.
That day, as Adam sat rocking on his porch, the dark clouds gathered
to the south. It was just past noon but looking south was like looking at night
time. It was still over a hundred degrees according to the old mercury
thermometer advertising Challenger Seed
Corn that hung near his front door but maybe they’d finally get rain.
There was a radio he could check, but checking the radio wouldn't
make it rain or rain any sooner. He'd know if it rained because he'd see it.
He didn't have a watch either but he could tell it was only about
15 minutes later when the sky over him had darkened enough for the streetlights
to come on and he could hear the thunder.
A harsh wind rushed through and he smelled the unmistakable scent
of rain hitting hot dirt and leaves. It wouldn't be long now.
Then it was on him. Huge drops of dirty rain, so thick he could barely
see across the street, hitting so hard they knocked leaves off the big oak tree
in his front yard.
The rich steamy odor given off by the flooding moisture on the
heated surfaces around him could almost choke a person. A powerful mixture of
brown dead grass and weeds, roofing shingles heated to 170 degrees, asphalt and
concrete streets, dirt violently combined into mud, and the tons of dust suspended
in the air, all smashed into solution by an incalculable quantity of water
falling from a column of clouds and wind 40,000 feet tall.
With the aroma came the cooling. The air temperature dropped
twenty degrees in 30 seconds. Amazing the changes rain and wind could bring.
One of God's biggest machines moved over the surface of the earth. Nothing and
no one could resist its power.
The world flashed bright blue-white once, twice. Adam's eyes closed
by reflex at the lightning, but not before he was almost knocked backwards off
his rocking chair by the deafening clap of thunder the light brought with it.
Even under the roof of his porch, Adam was pelted by the rain that
the wind blew sideways and dry leaves skittered around his feet.
There were a few more lightning strikes nearby and Adam held his
ground, but he no longer rocked. He sat stock still and bore witness to the
display. He thought back for another time he’d sat through a thunderstorm like
this one. The violence that surrounded him drove any comparable wonders beyond
of his reach.
And just as fast as it arrived, the tempest of lightning, thunder,
and fierce winds was gone, moved on ahead of the storm. What was left was the
rain, falling straight down. Enough water to make instant mud puddles in the
yard, to form small rivers on the street sweeping anything loose along with the
flow, to choke the downspouts and overflow the gutters of his house causing an
unbroken sheet of water 20 feet long to cascade over the edges. The sound of
the rain overpowered all other sounds except the receding rumble of thunder as
the storm moved on.
Adam marveled at the power of the engine he'd just witnessed. One
day soon, he thought. One day soon, he would see that machine from the inside
and work on it.
* * *
Excellent!
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