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Five minutes later, I’m driving the wrong direction along the Appalachian Parkway, listening to an episode of This American Life about an artisanal maple syrup farm in New Hampshire that also takes in retired police dogs, because I’m going to the ranger station in the hopes that their parking lot still gets enough Wi-Fi signal from inside the building for me to check my email.
I don’t think Madison, the twenty-two-year-old who runs the “OMG” section of hypefeed.com, needs me to check in with her. I’m pretty sure that if she wants changes made to Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl, she’ll just make them.
But I need to check in. I can’t help it. I like doing things correctly, so if something needs tweaking in my celebrity dogs article, I want to know.
I pull into the parking lot of the ranger station. The station is closed, because it’s a little past six in the evening, but when I was visiting my family a couple years ago and they took me hiking way out here, the Wi-Fi worked all night long. That time I was also checking for emails from my editor, only then it actually mattered because I’d just turned in a piece about vandalism and police brutality in Raleigh.
That piece, I was proud of. It examined the internal biases of the policing system. It talked about how teens of color in Raleigh were five times more likely to be charged for the same acts of vandalism as white teens, and twice as likely to face brutality.
It spoke truth to power. It shined a light on an ugly truth. It did the things that journalism and newspapers are supposed to do.
Ten Celebrity Dogs So Cute You’ll Hurl does none of these things. TCDSCYH does nothing but attract eyes to a webpage so that those eyes will also look at advertising and earn hypefeed.com some money.
Anyway, there’s still free Wi-Fi in the parking lot.
It’s not fast, but it’s fast enough to check my email, and sure enough, there’s one from Madison.
It says: Cool, thanks.
I guess she doesn’t have any notes for me then, and I should probably leave this parking lot and make the drive back to my parents’ house, where I’m living while unemployed, but instead I go through some emails, learning that several positions I’ve applied for have been filled.
Great. Nice. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m closing in on a hundred rejections. I don’t even know how many I’ve just never gotten a response from. It’s not the best feeling.
I check Twitter to distract myself from my problems. I check Instagram. Facebook. Reddit.
Suddenly, rain smacks against my windshield in big, fat drops, and I look up. I’ve somehow been looking at nonsense on my phone for almost twenty minutes, and the sky’s so dark it looks like twilight.
Oops.
I twist the key, turn the radio back on, and pull out of the ranger station parking lot, heading back the way I came on the parkway, toward town, hoping that I can beat the storm and get home before it gets really bad.
Ten minutes later, it’s clear that I miscalculated and am driving directly into the storm, something I probably should have checked first.
It’s raining so hard that I feel like I’m under a waterfall, my wipers completely ineffective against the onslaught.
Every thirty seconds the sky strobes with lightning, the thunder instant and deafening, so loud and close it vibrates my car. The thick forest on either side of the road is waving and dancing in the wind, enormous trees bending and swaying so much they look like they might break.
“Shit,” I whisper to myself, the steering wheel in a death grip, both palms sweating. Every muscle in my body is rigid, and I’m driving so slowly that it doesn’t even register on my speedometer. I’d stop, but there’s nowhere to pull over, and if I keep going maybe there will be soon.
I have to be almost back to the trailhead, right?
Lightning strikes again, so close I swear I can feel the crackle in the air, and I tense even harder, sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat. Thunder shakes the earth, the road, my car, or maybe that’s me shaking.
“What Juan didn’t expect,” Ira Glass is saying, “was that the girl he’d spent all those months—"
I smack the radio button, and his voice shuts off because I can’t deal with it right now. I take deep breath after deep breath, wishing that I’d stayed in the parking lot or just gone home after the run, because Cool, thanks is incredibly not worth getting struck by lightning over.
You won’t get struck by lightning, I remind myself. All these trees are way taller than you, and hardly anyone—
There’s another flash and the world goes pink-white, buzzing, pulsing, and for a split second I think I got hit, but as the thunder rattles through everything, chattering my teeth, I slam on the brakes and realize that I can do that, and at the exact same time I realize that it was the enormous tree twenty feet away, the crack so loud that it sounds like it’s rending the heavens.
