Now that we’re off daylight savings time, I leave work only to be greeting by a world cloaked, a thin veil of bright sky clinging to the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz mountains. Tonight, however, was just a little bit different. While we’ve been enjoying some cool, cloudly days this week, tonight we were all treated to huge spiderwebs of lightning spun across the clouds.
The sky was the color of wet ash, clouds stretched from the north and west down across the San Francisco bay. As I left SLAC and headed north on highway 280, I saw the crack of grey-blue sky above the mountains, a pale reminder that behind the veil hides a beautiful sunset. A slight wash of orange impinged on the grey clouds, thinning and vanishing as I looked east.
It was just as I was leaving SLAC that I saw the first flash in the sky. At first I thought it was phantom lightning, a lightning whose flash is seen reflected on the clouds but whose seed, the brilliant tendril of electric blue, was hidden from view. It was only once I merged into thick, rush hour traffic that I was treated to the first, humbling lightning web. Three arcs spanned the night sky, a fourth appearing to shoot from the clouds to the ground behind a mountain. As I reached the Farm Hill Road exit, I decided to leave the highway and go to the scenic view high above on the Canada College campus. Dodging traffic and swinging into the parking lot on the eastern side of the hill, I killed the lights and switched off the engine.
My patience was rewarded a minute later with a true spiderweb of electricity. The flash was momentary, but it seemed a set of irregular, concentric blue cracks in the clouds had suddenly been spun by the furious tension high in the sky. A slow, laborious thunder responded a few moments later, sounding like the painful breathing of a man fighting tuberculosis. This weather, the color of the night sky, the sound of the thunder, all seemed to make the night a picture of ill health. This was a rare beauty, though, a kind of weather I once admired regularly in the Midwest but of which I have been starved here on the peninsula.
