One of the things you notice when you move from Cairns to Brisbane is the difference in storms.
In Cairns, storms appear seemingly out of nowhere and turn everything bleak and dreary. If you wait for the rain to end, you’ll never get anything done. It’s the type of rain that sets in for days, swelling drains and gutters with swift-moving water and raising the river levels so rapidly that you all you can do is quietly hope the roads will be flooded so you have an excuse to stay home on the couch, breathing that fresh storm smell.
I used to live in a beach suburb with a single road that would always go under as soon as it rained, and we’d be stranded for a few days. It was the best when the storms set in while we were at school because suddenly we’d be called to the office, all Yorkeys Knob kids, and be told we were being collected immediately since we had to get home before the roads were cut off.
The creek behind our house would swell, and we’d track the water level rising by counting the squares on the chickenwire fence. During cyclones, the squares would disappear under the red mud water and we’d all swear we saw crocodiles swimming past, though I’m not entirely sure anyone ever did. My childhood seems so full of storms, reckless Nature showing us what she could do, while we simply made the most of our time off school.
I remember the preparations for cyclones–checking batteries in torches, taping windows with masking tape spider webs, collecting sandbags and dragging them to line the back of the house. Most vivid is the time we helped the neighbours throw their plastic outdoor furniture into the swimming pool so that it wouldn’t be blown away. My sisters and I jumped in the pool, too, making games of dodging underwater white tables and swimming through curved chair legs while rain drummed distantly on the water’s surface.
I didn’t appreciate the summer storms until I moved away. Brisbane’s storms take all day to roll in, sucking all moisture from the air so that you spend the whole day sweating, waiting for them to arrive. When they finally do, sometimes with that eerie green sky like a strange omen, they hit hard and fast: thunder cracks, rain falls heavily, and everything is intense and chaotic, but then, just as you’re about to cancel your evening plans, it’s suddenly over.
But then there is the smell that rises like steam from the hot bitumen road after rain has fallen. It’s sort of warm and dusty, like a cat’s coat, and it reminds me of those long storms of my hometown, where we’d wait for the creek to overflow and then carry down our black rubber tubes to spend the weekend trusting the current to hold us up. Sometimes it wouldn’t, and we’d go under the red water, so opaque it seemed thick, limbs flailing desperately to keep hold of the tube if nothing else.
Then you’d break the water’s surface, a swamp rat desperate for air, and all you could do was laugh. Everything seemed so shiny and renewed, and the world simply glittered.
(Image is not my own. Can’t seem to find its exact source.)
(write it!) 