A Modern Rip Van Winkle Experience
BY DON DOUCETTE
Several recent nighttime thunder and lightning events brought us back in time some years ago to a hot summer afternoon in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
For many years we enjoyed a good deal of time rambling throughout the Berkshire Hills and Taconic Range in western Massachusetts.
This particular afternoon found us unhurriedly exploring Pittsfield State Forest as we drove to the summit car park with a wide westward overlook of the larger Hudson Valley.
We were the lone auto in the summit parking lot.
And then it began as a summer electric storm built before our eyes in the west complete with the looming deep-gray clouds moving and lumbering our way…coupled with sparkling lightning and booming thunder bumpers, we allowed the storm to approach and wash over us as it shed its watery burden.
We sat snug in our dry cocoon as the world around us flashed and shook the very landscape beneath and as sheets of water flash-flowed westward and downslope as new sparkling liquid fodder for the Hudson River Watershed.
The New York Catskills are nearby and it seemed logical at that moment that Washington Erving’s creative mind during such a similar event might have conjured the creation the fictional American tale of Rip Van Winkle’s famous twenty-year nap as he slept through the American Revolution.
Was it this fictional tale of drunken sailors rolling nine-pins in the sky…the loud Hudson Valley thunder that finally woke Rip Van Winkle from his long drunken nap?
Our own parents told us as little children during summer storms that thunder was only “the little people” rolling hog’s heads (wooden barrels) in the clouds.
This singular storm was a thing of hugging beauty as it moved eastward beyond Pittsfield trailing behind a freshly dripping world amidst receding reports of thunder and as the western sky over the iconic Hudson Valley once again brightened.
Don Doucette