Things that go Boom in the Night

It came out of nowhere. Yesterday was a typical Pilbara day – scorchingly hot, bright blue skies with not a cloud to be seen, a little humid maybe but with all the rain we’ve had recently that’s not unusual. The washing took under an hour to dry and I had to wear sunglasses to take it down from the line. Business as usual then. So when I tiptoed into our darkened bedroom, trying not to wake The Husband who had gone to bed an hour earlier, I was rather surprised to hear a distant rumbling that sounded very similar to thunder. Presuming it to be a car backfiring or traffic on the main road, I dismissed it and proceeded to get ready for bed. And that was when the room lit up. It was like someone was standing directly outside our window taking pictures with a huge flash. And then it happened again. And again. And again. Bemused, I drew back the blinds to see what looked like WWIII. The sky was illuminated with constant flashes of light, as if we were being bombed. I was now officially scared. Were the ports being attacked? Millions of dollars worth of iron ore and salt are shipped out of those nearby ports, an incredibly valuable facility for processing gas is currently being built a mere 20km away, and we’re over 1,000km from the nearest city. If you think about it, we’re sitting ducks. Then I heard the boom again – was that the sound of falling bombs?


By this point I had woken The Husband up with my cries of angst but he apparently did not share my fears. “For goodness sake, come to bed and shut up,” he moaned. Charming. There I was, terrified that we were about to be blasted to smithereens by foreign despots, and he’s annoyed about being woken up. “But look, look,” I cried, pointing to the sky. “It’s just a storm,” he said, grouchily, as he buried his face in his pillow. Oh. Right. Well it was a pretty scary storm. The thunder roared again, and then again, and then the rain started to hammer down and the wind all of a sudden picked up and began to rip around the house. The flashes of lightning were so bright, it hurt to look at them and I could feel them burning my eyeballs even through tightly closed lids. Of course, it didn’t help that The Husband, who by now had taken interest in the storm in the way an excitable 10 year old would, had insisted that we keep the blinds open so that we could watch it.

This was more terrifying than the cyclone, especially as it came without warning. How I managed to fell asleep I do not know – the lightning like 100 paparazzi photographers all simultaneously taking pictures with flashing cameras combined with the roar of the wind, rain and thunder was not especially conducive to sleep but somehow I drifted off. And when I woke this morning, the sky was bright, the sun warm and only a few fluffy clouds remained. It was as if the storm had never happened.