SHELTER

I drove for two and a half hours in the rain tonight, through a thunderstorm on the Kansas prairie. Rain poured down in a torrent, then a trickle, then a torrent. Lightning flashed all over the horizon, King Lear-like. And I was cocooned in my car, a tiny portable shelter moving across the dark land, with the tail-light of a semitrailer as my lighthouse — my Pharos of Alexandria that kept going at Emporia while I turned left.

Violent weather has a visceral appeal. It makes a mockery of our doings. It keeps things in perspective. I love in the movie "Magnolia" when it starts raining frogs. Amphibians just start falling out of the sky. No explanation. And every bit of drama up to that point is rendered trivial, nonexistent. It seems like Hollywood fantasy — frogs falling from the firmament — but it's really just emotional realism. Our private storms do not compare.

And violent weather challenges us, as in: Live through this.

Children love to build shelters. All kinds: treehouses, wooden forts, tents, refrigerator-box complexes. Give them a sheet and an ottoman and you'll get a Turkish palace. But this instinct for shelter making, it is not just playing house. It is primeval. It is Prometheus stealing fire. It is saying to Nature: You can't touch me.

Tonight, after the rain grew more steady and hypnotic, after I noticed my thoughts running in a sad, unproductive loop, I remembered my little shelter had another bulwark against Nature: a car stereo. I put in a CD, one I bought because of Beth, who pulled me out of our shared home one night to see Neko Case.

It smells a lot like engine oil
And tastes like being poor and small
And popsicles in summer

Beth wrote a poem about childhood once, how it feels when no one likes you, just before and just after that realization, the moment in time when your self-image — You are an invincible pirate swashbuckling through the South Seas — meets the image others have of you — You are a disgusting tomboy whom everyone hates. There is that heavy, new awareness — that words like crestfallen were invented for — and the accompanying shame. You can't even tell your mom because you somehow know that, secretly, in her heart, she will love you less for being unloved.

I think of that story a lot, especially on nights like this, when I feel poor and small and Beth is out of reach. About her being abandoned by her playmates and the brave face she put on for her not-so-adoring parent. I'll build a shelter against this, Mom.

She will laugh at me for saying this, but Beth is the bravest person I have ever known. And here's something brave she wrote — a compliment she will likewise dismiss.

I wish instead of ill-fated adult partners we could have been childhood friends, lopping off the heads of Barbies and sneaking cigarettes behind the garage and building shelters against the storm.

I had a Naomi too.

I'm with you in Rockland, Billy.
In my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on
the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night.