THUNDER DOWN UNDER
When the bus arrived in Shark’s Bay, the boiling day had curdled into a full-scale thunderstorm. Rain of biblical proportions hammered down on the roof of the bus.
I gazed out the window and nudged Mom. “Look at that.”
Outside, palm trees were bending in the wind. It was like the news footage you see when Channel 2 is reporting a Category 5 storm from Miami or Haiti. I saw a small car tumbling through the air, followed by a pizza shop and what looked like a whole herd of cows.
Okay, I made that last part up. But it did look bad.
“I hope it’s not a hurricane,” Mom said. She leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “This isn’t a hurricane or something we should be worried about, is it?” She paused, then added, “We’re American.”
“Nah, just a bit of a breeze,” the bus driver said. “Anyway, we don’t believe in hurricanes. In Australia, we have cyclones.”
“Isn’t a cyclone just another name for a hurricane?” I asked.
My Friday nights in front of the Discovery Channel had included plenty of shows on typhoons, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes. I was an expert at this point.
“Nah,” the driver said, looking at me as if I was nuts. “Totally different thing. She’ll be right, mate.”
“What about those hailstones?” Mom said.
“Those itty-bitty little specks of ice? Completely flamin’ harmless! Now get off me flamin’ bus, ya drongos!”
The bus driver skidded to a halt in what looked like the parking lot of a fried-chicken joint. The hail was coming down hard and quick, so we made a run for a bus shelter. We had gone from superhot to ice-cold in less than two minutes. We were clearly in the middle of some enormous natural disaster. The best we could hope for was that our waterlogged bodies would be found wedged in the branches of a tree a week later during the massive cleanup operation.
Over the noise of the hailstones hammering down, Mom told me that Mayor Coogan’s brother, Biff, was supposed to meet us. I leaned against a graffiti-covered wall and looked out at the curtain of hail.
“This isn’t what I imagined,” I said, but Mom wasn’t listening.
