the storm

In my dream, there were birds flapping against my face. I swatted back at them, but they wouldn’t quit. In the background, the roar of a gas station hand dryer.

My body came to life before my brain caught up. I swiped at the air and blinked hard and saw wings and yellow nylon pummeling my face. ??? was as close as my brain could come to a coherent thought.

The birds faded from view, my brain organized itself into some semblance of consciousness, and I came to the realization that my tent had collapsed. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was moving — shuddering and wriggling like a cat trying to escape a hug.

I grabbed hold of the wall and held it still enough to peer through the bug netting, and that’s when the pieces clicked into place: A massive cloudbank was charging over the lake, and the trees were bowed over in the roaring wind. I scrambled out of my tent with one blind thought: RAINFLY.

The air was chaotic and charged, whipping my dress around my legs, twigs and rocks biting into my bare feet. It felt like riding in a car on the interstate with all the windows down. Panicked, still a quarter-asleep, I tried to wrestle my rainfly into place, but the wind kept tearing it out of my hands and flattening my tent. With a lot of cursing, I managed to secure the fly, replace the stakes that got ripped out, and then dive back inside — more to support the structure than to take shelter.

But then a thought came to mind: Is it safe to be right next to a lake in a lightning storm?

Google’s response was, “haha no.”

I shot out of my tent like it was on fire and crashed through the bushes toward… I have no idea where. I was barefoot; I wasn’t even wearing a bra. And then, finally, my logical brain woke up enough to take the steering wheel. 

“What are you doing,” she said flatly. “Girl, you have a bicycle, remember?”

“Oh, dope.”

So I put on my shoes, dragged some driftwood and rocks over the top of my tent and yelled, “GOOD LUCK, TENT!” over the shrieking wind, and then unlocked Lucky and chased my headlight into the wild night. I headed for a stand of trees — maybe I could hunker in there, wait out the worst of it, and then go back for my tent once it was over.

And then I saw it: Shelter! Salvation!

An outhouse! 

I careened over and tried the door — it was open! — and turned on the light. The floor was concrete but clean. No spiders, no bugs, and the toilet even had a lid. As far as outhouses go, this was a palace. I gave a cheer of victory, leaned Lucky against the wall, put down the lid and had a seat.

After a moment, I thought, “Sleeping pad’d be pretty nice right about now.”

And so I rode like a madwoman back into the wild, windy night, rolled tent, pad, and sleeping bag together into a big sloppy burrito that I stuffed into a pannier, and then tore back just as fast as I could, cackling and breathless with the exhilaration of it all.

As soon as I set up my sleeping arrangement, the storm hit.

You know how you count the seconds between the thunder and the lightning, and that tells you how far away the lightning is? There was no counting on that night; they were linked like zipper teeth. And me cheering from my bed on the outhouse floor. 

Before this trip, I probably couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I’d be grateful — profoundly so — to sleep in an outhouse. But that night, I was giddy. There’s a special kind of relief that comes from knowing you’ve hit bottom. I mean, this was undoubtedly the worst place I was going to sleep all trip. And if I was this happy to be in the worst place… I could handle anything that might come my way.

In a world underwater, I had found an air bubble. A safe, dry place to sleep.