A bolt sizzles between the fire tower and my truck 100 yards away. A thick lump of smoke wafts across the steep road. My eyes widen at sound and shape exploding in the woods. Though I’ve seen hundreds of bolts in 20 seasons, I am astonished. From my wooden chair I peer out the west window trying to see into the draw where lightning has once again not hit the highest point. Will fire start?
Inside days of monsoon moisture, it could go either way. A tree blows up and pine needles catch or all that electricity grounds without flame. I am eager to walk the 10 minutes to see it up close, but I have to wait while a quarter inch of rain falls in half an hour. Then for an hour I look at steamy mists collect and stroke assorted peaks and ridge tops. For another hour I look around for the small distant blue of smoke rising on the north slope of the Peaks, or on the east side of Kendrick, or 27 miles away on Mormon Mountain. Finally, off duty, I duck into the wet nostril-stroking aroma of the woods at my feet.
Between tower and where I park my truck isn’t far. Along the road several trees bear the spiral scar of a direct hit by lightning. Every mountaintop on the plateau shows evidence of monsoon electricity flickering from cloud to ground. Some trees explode, some catch fire, some simmer awhile and then, sprinkled by rounds of daily showers, go on living for decades. Many show a healed-over curve from upper trunk to ground: an electric-incised tattoo.
I look but don’t see a newly hit tree, so I go to the leaning fir tree with slightly upturned roots that offers a seat where I often relax with my thinking. The shadows lengthen. Sounds begin to weave together a familiar pattern of dusk murmurings. Finally I notice a piece of blonde in the gray and brown and green. It is a chip of a pine tree’s insides. When I pick it up, I see the exploded tree 20 yards away.
Picture this: 60 feet of pine with a girth of a hundred inches begins the day dripping with overnight rain caught in its branches. Six inches of its old needles carpet the ground in all directions. It casts shadows over slim, young aspens and a faint game trail and a standing dead snag half burned from fire this century or last. Midday a storm cell passes across the Inner Basin and dumps giant blue buckets of rain into Lockett Meadow. The grumbling clouds linger on the north slopes awhile before smearing rain across Highway 89, turning it into a slick, long snake where cars slow down. Lightning bolts zot against the Cinder Hills chasing ATVs off the slopes, and as the storm expands, visitors to Sunset Crater dash into their cars. Rain pounds the black lava flow. From my view it looks like a giant slug has passed leaving behind a smear of pea-size white hail in the yellow grasses of Wupatki.
Then as if it forgot to do something, the cell backs up against O’Leary Peak. When I hear rumbles with sharp cracking sounds, I close all the windows in the tower and let the dispatcher know I’ll be out of service for lightning because I don’t want to be on the two-way radio with its big antenna on the roof. Though the metal structure is designed with protection to ground a direct hit, I take the keys out of my pocket anyway and sit on the wooden chair with the glass feet. Lightning bolts flicker at 8,900 feet on one side and blast rock a thousand feet lower on the other side. SMACK BOOM! A bolt nearby sizzles and a ball of blue smoke follows.
Later I find a tangle of green boughs dashed to the ground and three bear-size chunks of the inside of a pine in a tumble of blonde disarray. Ten feet of tree still stands where there had been a giant in the morning. I sniff, wondering if heat is buried in the duff. But not this time. For the next three dusks I walk to sit with this powerful beginning of a tree’s next journey, its spiraled slow motion return to soil. I keep a piece of its bark on top of my typewriter.
