The lightning bolt slammed into the ground with thousands of times the force and speed of a sledgehammer blow on an anvil. It struck so close to me that I heard no thunder, only the unmistakably loud, monstrously powerful “snap” that is characteristic of a bolt that hits far too near to its observer. I had been sitting on my bed reading when it happened; I knew instantly what had occurred, for this was not the first time that lightning had struck so close to me that no thunder could be heard. Many years as a guide in the wilderness mountains of Montana had brought me into near-contact with lightning along high ridges at timber line more than a few times. It is one of nature’s most lethal forces when it strikes living creatures, but the other side of lightning is that it is one of the world’s most quintessentially important life-giving phenomena. For the full story, see pages 204-205 in my book, The Life of the San Pedro River. The next morning, I found the place where the bolt had impacted. A tape measure revealed that the lightning had struck 53 feet away. The electromagnetic pulse from that bolt fried our telephone system and our computer router.
The storms of this year’s monsoon season in southern Arizona have been wonderful – thus far, our rain gauge has registered 9.56 inches of rain since mid-June, resulting in a grand resurgence of life all across this hot and formerly dry landscape.
On the morning of August 20, a serious storm pounded the ground with so much rain that the area around our buildings became an unbroken sheet of water. I could hear toads starting to call from our overflowing bird pond. Before long, dozens of spadefoot toads came out of their underground lairs to join in the party, all of them hopping and swimming through the flooded landscape in beelines toward the pond. This was a critical time for the amphibians, for in a normal year, they get only one or two brief chances to breed. It was also a rare sight, for I have never seen such activity in the daytime…but this was a doozy of a storm.
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As the rain subsided, I stepped outside. I heard the familiar roar of one of our local washes that had become engorged with flood water. A short walk of a quarter mile took me to a place where I could look down from the edge of a vertical cutbank at the flowing wash…
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Next, I walked over to see what was going on in the little pond – there were eight pairs of Couch’s spadefoot toads in amplexus! A couple days later, after thousands of toad eggs hatched, our pond was teeming with wriggling throngs of tiny tadpoles.
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Later in the day, Kathleen and I walked down the road to have a look at where the big wash crosses the road. The sound of the flood grew loud as we approached a point where we could see the flow, over 300 feet in width. The dirt road – the only road that serves the entire valley – had become impassable once again. In the midst of the turbulent flow, where the waters ran deepest, trees were being tossed around like toys, ripped from their root-bound moorings as they sped downslope toward the San Pedro River. Hundreds of tons of sediment, gravel, and rocks were being transported toward the floor of the valley in a rip-roaring tumult of rain water.
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A few hours later, the sun had melted down into the nether regions of the western horizon. My wife and I walked outside around 11:00pm to listen to the night sounds. After turning off our flashlights, we witnessed something that is seldom seen here – fireflies!! Few of Earth’s creatures are capable of instilling such an immediate and compelling sense of awe and wonder as fireflies are. They were emitting distinctive, paired flashes of remarkably bright green light – in so doing, they identified themselves down to the species level. We were seeing southwestern synchronous fireflies, Photinus knulli.
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