“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
? Haruki Murakami
There is something infatuating about a summer storm. The sudden drop in temperature. Acceleration of wind. Bone shaking explosion of thunder. Sweet scent of cool rain mixing with warm earth.
Metaphorically, people equate storms with trouble. An eruption of danger which tests the relationship between two people. Or an entire nation, as with the current storms preceding November’s election.
The hope is not just to survive, but to emerge stronger and wiser.
I’m reminded of a particular storm long ago, after Marianne and I had gone on several dates.
We saw “Love Story” at the drive-in theater. Dinner at Petey’s Bungalow another night. Played twilight miniature golf at 95th & Fairfield.
Once we had a drink at the Top of the Rock, and then a moonlit walk along Lake Michigan.
But we had yet to spend an entire day together.
So when Marianne agreed to a trip to Twin Lakes, Wis., for boating and fishing on a Saturday, I wondered if it might be a mistake.
Would there be enough to talk about? Would she even like the outdoors? Was it just too early to test our relationship this way?
“You break the prop, you buy it,” said the manager at the Twin Lakes Marina.
We had just driven two hours and had asked to rent a motor boat. Ordinarily, I might have been inclined to walk out of the place. But Marianne’s smile set a different tone, as if characters like the marina manager were objects of entertainment.
“Anything bad happens, I’ll buy the propeller and your hat,” I said, nodding at the manager’s fedora.
It felt good to speed with the wind on big Lake Elizabeth. Marianne held onto the middle seat, her back to me, her long brown hair whipping wild, its fragrance sweetening the lake’s warm and earthy scent.
I pushed the kill switch as we glided into a shallow bay, shaded by overhanging branches from weeping willows on the shoreline.
Though the sky had been mostly blue, a distant rumble of thunder made us both turn to see a sinister cluster of clouds in the southwest. A solitary boat is a magnet for lightning.
“We should go back,” I said.
The starter rope seemed abnormally stubborn. Two more times, and it still would not turn over. The fourth pull, the rope broke, causing me to nearly fall backward.
The stormed closed in.
“I’ll have to row us back,” I said.
We switched seats, and I rowed in the direction of the marina. Long, hard pulls, inching our way against the wind.
Drizzle quickly turned to sheets of rain. I gave her my maroon softball team windbreaker. The rain turned horizontal, and I could barely see.
A deafening thunderclap, and the boat seemed to bounce in the water, as the sky and water glowed from a bolt of lightning. For a moment, I thought we’d been struck.
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I checked to see if Marianne was OK. Raising her head, she showed her teeth, grinning that we survived a close call. I was grateful for her lack of panic, and for her confidence in me, though I’d done little to inspire it.
I turned the boat 90 degrees and headed for the nearest house.
It seemed like an hour before reaching the dock, though it was probably minutes. When the hull scraped the sand bottom, I felt enormous relief.
A man who looked slightly like Humphrey Bogart with gray hair, let us in. He wore a blue dress shirt and tie — odd for a Saturday afternoon.
He looked at Marianne, whose baseball jacket was drenched, a lock of hair peeking below the hood, her brown eyes moist but welcoming.
“You’re braver than I am,” the man said.
He listened to our story — the pleasant start-up weather, the boat rental, the broken rope.
Then he held up his hand and asked, politely, if we would excuse him for just a minute. He left and returned with two fluffy bath towels, and then explained he needed several minutes to finish with a wedding in the other room.
Apparently, we had interrupted a county judge performing a Saturday wedding in his home! We should have felt terrible, but the judge would not allow it.
“Sailors in distress,” said the judge, “you drop everything to help. It’s international law.”
He winked at Marianne. “And I guess I ought to know.”
After he married the young couple, the judge phoned the marina, then offered us coffee while we waited for the marina manager to drive over.
“Are you folks OK?” the manager asked us when he arrived. This was the same man who sternly warned us about the prop. But he was transformed, obsequious in the judge’s presence. He told us not to worry about the boat.
Meanwhile, the judge drove us back to our car.
We sat up front, Marianne in the middle, as I thought about the day. The lake. The storm. Finding sanctuary with a justice of the peace in the middle of a wedding ceremony.
Yes, we’d had had dates. But today it felt right, like the moment when one acrobat catches another.
Almost exactly one year from that Saturday, we took part in our own wedding ceremony. And though we have weathered many storms over the last 44 years, that first one we won’t forget.
Former Oak Forest resident David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and author of “The Territory.”