By Bob Hicks
CRACK! DOOM! CRACK! DOOM!
The sky splits above the high desert. Great bursts of lightning roil the midnight blackness with a frenzy of white heat. The thunder rattles deeply like the cries of gods at war, and the rain is rain — hard, fast, fierce, a gullywash of frantic energy that, soon spent, will sink meekly back into the sand.
In the morning the sun is out, the air has the fresh bite of swiftly drying earth, the small life of the arroyo a few dozen yards beyond our windows chirps placidly on. A couple of years ago we watched transfixed as a sudden storm turned the same dry creek bed into a swift flood of churning water, a rampage that rose rapidly from nothing almost to the undercurve of the little bridge on the nearby road. Hours later the arroyo was dry again, but these torrents can shift a creek’s course: in the desert, water makes up its own mind.