A white-knuckled ride home
through a late April storm

I drove home in the violent late April storm that granted the ranchlands a much needed 2.5 inch soaking. The system moved quickly across northern Mexico and into south Texas without much warning. I left Laredo for the ranch in the thick of it, long past the hour I should have started home. South Laredo was a wet snarl of traffic in rain that was coming down more quickly than the wipers could move it off the windshield. After Santa Rita, the traffic thinned but the rain intensified and fell in sheets that obscured the center stripes on the pavement as well as those on the edge of Hwy. 83. As the street lights disappeared, the world turned into a blurred curtain of gray water, illuminated only at the point that it met the beam of my headlights.
Even knowing I was in a safe vehicle with good tires, my heart raced at the way the truck felt when it hit patches of deep water on the pavement. Rising to the hill of the roadside overlook across the highway from the Link Ranch, I could see lightning that moved to firmament in unpredictable, violent strikes that made me grip the steering wheel with white knuckles. The accompanying thunder was so loud and frequent that I reacted to each and every boom that reverberated in the cab of the truck.
There weren't many of us traveling Hwy. 83 that night and those who did crawled along a road covered at times with several inches of water, a road with little visible ahead or to the sides. Now and again in a flash of lightning I could see that the ditches alongside the highway were filled and making their way to the nearest tributary to the Río Grande.
I kept hoping that it was raining at our ranch, thinking this kind of a system was wide and could well saturate a large swath of terrain. To my dismay, it was dry near San Ygnacio just after the first onion fields before town. Crestfallen, I continued the few parched miles northeast and turned into our gate. I could smell the ozone in the atmosphere and see the lightning, but the storm looked remote and faraway to the south.
Then I heard the din of big raindrops on the metal roof, drops that quickly turned into a torrent right about the minute I caught the evening weathercast that portrayed the storm system over this part of Zapata County in bright orange on the satellite maps.
It was now raining in earnest and so hard that the gutterspouts couldn't carry the water off quickly enough. A hard torrent of water spilled from one end of the guttering. The last thing I heard Heatwave Berler say on the weathercast as I grabbed one of my favorite tightly woven straw hats was "hail." I drove my truck to the cover of the barn, which is about a block from our house, amazed that most of the ground between the barn and the house had become one puddle of muddy rushing water several inches deep.
Ask me where I believed all the neighborhood snakes were in that deluge and ask me how quickly I stepped through the murky unknown to find my way home.
How safe I felt to be able to survey the rest of the storm from my porch and to hear it in my heightened adrenaline state continue into the night, the rumbling strobes of light visible on the walls of a little house surrendering itself into a night that had been blessed by rain.