Last Night’s Storm

The storm blew in from the sea like a demented demon; hurling a horizontal wall of water ahead of itself, sending the flimsy seaside shacks flying into the liquid white air, its dark, malignant core following at a slower pace, dragging the sea behind it.

Shrieking round obstacles, or hurling them aside like matchsticks, the wind sweeps across the land.  Frenzied, lashing rain whites out the day, overflows gutters, fills wells, infiltrates every crack and crevice, creating instant lakes inside, as though it were out.

In its wake, the coast is dark; all lights extinguished.  A thin, meandering ribbon of road wends its way through a long, shallow lake, slick and shining like a patent leather raincoat.  The palm trees have been groomed and the cottonwoods completely shorn.

An old man stands watching on three legs … the Matara bus ran into his house …

... silver-blue-green-white oceanic might.

Up on Dagoba headland, I discovered a blowhole; the seas are running high after last night’s storm.  It blew right up at me – spumed way up, wide and frothy.  I stand, braced against my boulder support, as each sonic boom announces the arrival of another flamboyant display of silver-blue-green-white oceanic might.  No ordinary New Years fireworks could hope to compare:  this was bicentennial in its scale.

In their sets of seven, one by one the waves collide against the rocks, hurtle a hillside of foam Dagoba-high, disintegrate into rainbows, recede in mounds of snowy white froth fizzing louder than a truckload of Coke cans opened at once.  And again, and again, they come.  Each wave creating its miracle of individual beauty, and enough power to light a city in each spellbinding, time-lapsed moment.