Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (8 page)

 • • • 

The rest of the group has gone to bed, but I’m keeping watch with Alan. He thinks it might be time for the lightning’s late-night episode—which will actually be the first we’ve witnessed—to begin. It’s just before midnight.

“The center of Lago de Maracaibo is where everything converges,” Alan says.

He’s talking about the winds—those coming from the mountains, which give the air a lofty boost, and the sea breezes that slip through the lake’s narrow strait—but the way he says it makes it seem like he’s talking about something greater, something spiritual. Maybe he is.

“I believe what the pre-Columbians believed,” he says of lightning bolts. “I think they’re spirits communicating with us.” He shakes his head. “You know, I’ve had so many coincidences happen out here that it actually sort of freaks me out.”

The most affecting happened without him even knowing. He was preparing to photograph the phenomenon, as he always does, when he saw a cloud in the shape of a giant white-feathered wing. The way the cloud reflected on the water made it appear to be half of a flight-worthy pair.

When he showed the resulting photograph to his daughter, telling her he thought the image looked like angel wings, of the sort he’d seen in Bible stories as a child, she was amazed. She asked when the photo was taken. Alan told her, and they both gasped at the significance. Exactly one year from the night he took the photo, his youngest granddaughter had lost her life to leukemia. “I hadn’t realized that until I looked,” Alan says. He puts a splayed hand on his temple and leans against his plastic chair, face hidden in shadows.

“I’ve told my family to come out here after I die,” he says. “I’ve told them that they’re going to see the most spectacular lightning show of their life when I’m gone.”

He grows quiet, saying that he hopes he hasn’t shared too much. It sounds weird, he knows. But, tonight, he’s feeling a little more reflective and open than usual because it’s his birthday. He’s forty-eight years old.

We stare into darkness, waiting. Nothing happens.

Then, thunder!

No. It was Romo.

The other group members have retired to hammocks, but Romo, wearing only bikini underwear, is lying belly-down on the cement bridge between the house and the tiny island. He’s fallen asleep with a blue flip-flop hanging from his left foot, as if he fell there. Another abrupt, opera-size growl of a snore makes me jump.

Alan laughs and says, “It does sound a little like thunder.”

Romo may be the most dramatic person I’ve ever met, even in his sleep.

Above, a double moon ring forms before our eyes. It’s a fairly rare, reflective ice-crystal phenomenon that’s traditionally thought to be an indicator of bad weather. As the bands expand, it appears that the moon is blowing rainbow-tinted smoke rings. Alan is appreciative of the sighting, but he’s not surprised. Stuff like this is always happening out here.

It was in this exact spot that he witnessed the 1998 solar eclipse. He says, “A phenomenon like that makes you feel strange. It makes animals go nuts. I met these eclipse hunters once and they told me that an eclipse is the oldest recorded event on earth.” As the story goes, there were two armies on their way to war when, suddenly, the sun disappeared. “They thought it was a sign from the gods,” Alan says. They were awed into peace.

“It was 400 BC; they can tell when it happened down to the second because of the cosmos. That’s the reason life exists, because the cosmos are so perfect. If the sun changed its temperature even a little, we’d be toast.” Alan leans forward in his chair. “It’s that sort of thing that can make you believe in God.”

Alan turns to look at me, breaking his sky gaze for the first time in a long while, and he says, “I feel really privileged to exist. I don’t understand how or why I’m here. It’s not like when I’m talking about my body; I’m talking about my soul. I believe we are something more than expression of self.”

This transcendence of self—ego—is what many religious traditions are about. It’s a major tenet of Buddhism, the religion Einstein thought was perhaps best suited of all organized religions to serve science, which tends to value the body of work created over time more than the insights of an individual. There’s really little room for ego in the long arch of discovery. No matter how far one ventures in a lifetime, how much knowledge or insight is gained, there’s always more to be known.

Einstein felt there were three sorts of religiosity. The first two were the religions of morals and fear; the third he called “cosmic religious feeling.” He understood this state to be one that had no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image, a way of thinking that allowed for failure and encouraged the sort of curious doggedness required of scientists and creative people. It was spirituality that transcended understanding, an embracement of mystery and the impulse to explore it. “In my view,” he wrote, “it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.”

Some people, it seems to me, attempt to fall away from their egos, to transcend into cosmic religiosity, via yoga or meditation. Others, like Alan—and, I’m increasingly realizing, myself—are seeking the same sort of experience in nature at its most spectacular, in moments that inspire a sort of temporary yielding of fear and expectation to awe and acceptance.

A sense of wonder is, I think, what Einstein meant by a cosmic religious feeling. And that is really what I’m seeking on this journey. It’s an admission of human frailty and the perfect magnificence of earth, the universe, time, in a way that removes the masks of humankind’s many religions to reveal their connectivity, the fact that we are—in the end—one.

 • • • 

Romo is the first to awaken when the lightning begins a few hours later. He greets everyone on the porch with a lightbulb-shaped lantern balanced over his head, symbolizing a moment of enlightenment
.
“
¡Tengo una idea!
” Romo says. “I have an idea!” The jokester, still wearing his bikini underwear and nothing else, starts to giggle.

He’s the opening act. We’re in for quite a show.

The clouds are lighting up the sky like giant rice-paper lanterns, strikes hidden in the clouds. These obscured flashes are known as sheet lightning. The absence of thunder makes these appear as what many people—including me—have long called heat lightning. But it’s just the distance—the viewers’ perspective—that makes it seem silent. Somewhere, the sky is screaming as air molecules are ripped apart by extreme heat.

A bolt—vivid and unshrouded—suddenly appears directly before us and shoots nearly straight to the ground, where it seems to hold for a very long time, a solid column of plasma. Lightning bolts are typically less than a half inch in diameter, but these appear as wide as the Mississippi River.

“
¡Qué bueno! ¡Qué bueno!
” Romo shouts, suddenly serious.

A rooster crows from somewhere in the village, and the lightning does make the night appear a faux sort of dawn, orange and yellow light illuminating the sky with forceful regularity. They expose the atmosphere—red toward the bottom where pollutants allow only red spectrum light to pass, and a phosphorescent blue toward the top, where the air is cleaner. The crown of the strike looks like pure fire, a butane flame.

A rush of wind blows across the island and Alan says, “That’s good. It’s growing. Come on!”

There are two storms in front of us. Three now. They’re getting stronger.

The wind picks up and the cloud-to-ground strikes become cloud-to-cloud. When a bolt of lightning flashes across the sky, filling the entire palette of night, we all cry out. The phenomenon shoots across the sky, forking in four different directions like a mapped nervous system.

“Bravo!” Romo screams. “Bravo!”

I’m so exhausted, I feel nearly nauseous with fatigue. What’s more, each time I turn to go into the house to get a long-sleeved shirt to prevent malarial mosquito bites, the lightning flashes even bolder than before. I turn, it shouts. It’s almost as if it’s tapping me on the shoulder, saying: The show isn’t over.

Matt offers to go in my stead—out of kindness more than concern about tropical diseases—but I urge him to stay. There’s too much to see here. And—unlike everything in our regular schedule at home, which allows only brief contact when passing the domestic baton—we’re going to see it together.

“All that concentrated energy!” Alan shouts.

“
¡Mira!
Look!” Romo shrieks.

The sky is a labyrinth of light that’s shooting north, south, east, west, but its structure is so complex it’s impossible to see where it begins or ends.

I close my eyes as I stand on the stilt-house porch. The air smells of swampy earth. I can hear the water lapping at the island’s ragged shores and the stilt-house’s cement pilings like the hull of a boat. My senses feel attuned. I’m living three-dimensionally. This, I realize, is what I’d been missing in those early days of Archer’s life. It had been so cold outside and I’d had a fragile infant. I’d been suddenly thrown into the visceral cycle of life and death in labor, but as a nervous new mother, I was rarely going outdoors.

I was more connected to the cycle of life than ever before, but I’d never been more isolated from its larger stage. The hunger I’ve had—the deep-seated one that I’ve been denying because of my who-am-I-to-ask-for-more outlook and my fear of being judged a kook for talking about spirituality—extends even beyond that, I think. In my childhood, I spent countless hours exploring nature—collecting wild mushrooms, sifting slick pebbles from streams. I spend much more time mining the Internet now. I have allowed myself to fall too far from grand shows of beauty.

But I am here now. Right here. Right now.

I open my eyes again. I watch the light of a hidden strike rise in the sky, cloud-to-cloud, spirits rising. The earth feels oddly charged with meaning, and truth and mythology seem to blur as in magical realism. The voices of ancestors crowd around us, crackling and cackling in what locals sometimes refer to as “rivers of fire.”

Flames fork overhead, in what scientists call spider lightning. They web the stars, like a game of connect-the-dots. Then, I see a strike zigzag across the air, pausing at each star step. Zig. Zag. Lightning bolts are usually too fast for the human eye to catch, but when intracloud lightning goes on for long enough, it reveals itself. This strike is going the distance. I’m able to watch it transpire. Lightning has been known to travel more than a hundred miles, but as far as Alan knows, there’ve been no studies on distance here. It seems to go on forever. What I’m watching is not a flash. It is an electric progression, a slow knitting of bone, a white-hot shard of marrow slicing through the darkness to give the flesh of night something to cling to as it takes shape.

“Tumbo, tumbo! Rumbo, rumbo!” Romo shouts to my right. He sounds like a sorcerer tending a cauldron of roiling energy. Above, bands of pink gold jump across the lower atmosphere, arching like the backs of Lake Maracaibo’s freshwater dolphins. They swim toward the heavens and back down again. Romo paces the uneven ground, half naked, his long white hair flying wild. He whistles through his teeth melodically, and his songs are carried by the wind. The bolts don’t stop until sunrise.

 • • • 

The following evening, dinner is local fare—there’s really no other kind out here: bottom-feeding fish baited with chicken heads. It’s served tuna-salad style, mixed with boiled eggs, and it’s better than it sounds, salty and filling. We sing “Happy Birthday” to Alan as winds whip at the hammocks, turning mosquito nets into festive, gauzy streamers.

“Anywhere else in the world,” Alan says, “and these winds would push the storms into a different position.” He shakes his head at enduring mysteries. Then he pushes away from the table. “Now,” he says, “for the celebratory fireworks!”

There are a few flashes in the distance, lightning hidden behind clouds. The epicenter appears to be just over the Catatumbo River, where drugs are trafficked in its light.

Romo is seated in a plastic chair. He lifts his arms and begins to wave them like an orchestra conductor. The flashes begin. “Ping. Ping. Ping. Rum. Rum. Rum.
¡Pada! ¡Pata!
”

His hands explode into the air, trying to mimic the lightning in the distance. It has become a silent symphony. There is no thunder—the storms are too far for that—but the light has become nearly constant now.

“There are five storms out there!” someone shouts.

“Maybe six,” Alan says.

The storms appear as a line across the sky, following the curvature of the Catatumbo River. The lightning has turned the sky into an instrument of light. I move my fingers as if I’m playing the piano while Romo continues his own embodiment of the phenomenon.

“Oopa!” he shouts, hooking his right arm like a boxer. “
¡Muy bien!
”

“Try to count how many you see in a minute,” Alan tells the group and we go silent. I lose count somewhere around forty. There is too much light, too much happening at once. Flashes from the different storms are bleeding into each other. Sometimes, spontaneous strikes occur in unison, their origin shrouded by the clouds. The fact that we can’t see their genesis only serves to make them more beautiful. It’s as if the clouds themselves are on fire.

“
Cien
, one hundred!” someone shouts.

Romo doesn’t try to count. He doesn’t seem to have the need to quantify. “
¡Tada! ¡Tada!
” he shouts, pinging his hands in the air, ringing invisible bells.

“Try to turn your head to follow the flashes and you’ll find you’re shaking it,” Alan says. “It’s cool!” To the left. To the right. Left. Right. It’s like trying to count flames flickering in a campfire. We can’t keep up. To even attempt is dizzying.

Just after midnight, as Alan has predicted, the storm fires up in the middle of the lake, on the other side of the house. I’m half asleep when I encounter Alan, who shouts: “This baby’s on top of us! It looks like it’s going to be massive! There are often minihurricanes here, and the night is young!” He begins to sing the Doors’
Riders on the Storm.