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I watch, motionless, as it falls.
“No,” I whisper out loud, powerless. “No, please, come on…”
The tree falls right across the road, ten feet in front of my car.
As it falls the slow-motion scene is illuminated by another crack of lightning, capturing the whole scene mid-action, so bright that I’m temporarily blind when I hear the cracking thump of the tree hitting the ground, something long and black draping itself over my windshield.
It’s the snake, I think wildly, shaking, suddenly freezing. It’s the snake I nearly stepped on, it’s found me and now it’s going to—
It’s the power lines. The tree must have fallen into them, and now they’re draped across my car, probably still live.
As if to confirm it, something sparks in the twilight in front of me, the pinprick of light barely visible through the driving rain. Lightning flashes. Thunder booms. I take a deep breath. I try to make my hands stop shaking. I turn the car off.
And then I stare out the windshield at the downed power lines and the fallen tree and try to remember what, exactly, you’re supposed to do in this situation.
I almost got struck by lightning and then that tree nearly fell on me, oh my God if I’d been ten feet further down the road I’d be a pancake—
I take another deep breath, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, and make myself stop thinking about things that almost happened so I can focus on the situation at hand.
There’s no service. I can’t Google it. All I can do is try to remember the electrical safety talk we got in school when I was in third grade.
Another lightning crack, the sky pink-white, thunder that sounds like the world being torn apart. Everything vibrates. In the darkness after, the only thing I can see is the sparking power lines on the road ahead of me.
I let out a shaky breath and think: there’s nothing I can do. More specifically, I don’t think I’m supposed to do anything.
I don’t think I’m supposed to get out of the car. I don’t think I’m supposed to drive anywhere, and even if I can, the hell with driving right now.
I can’t call 911, so I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to wait until someone else comes along, and then eventually I’m going to be rescued and I’m going to go home and shower and put on my pajamas and I’m going to make hot chocolate and hell yes I’m going to doctor it with rum.
So I sit. And I wait. I shut my eyes against the lightning and breathe through the thunder and after a little while, I stop shaking.
After a little while longer, the storm starts to move off. The lightning and thunder grow further apart, the flashes more and more infrequent, the trees on the road not swaying as violently. It could be minutes. It could be hours. I lose track completely.
And yet, no one comes down the road. Not a single solitary soul, and the wires are still right there on my car, sparking away, soaking wet exactly like powerlines shouldn’t be.
I wonder if I could just drive away. I wonder if I should somehow leap from the car, since I’m wearing rubber-soled tennis shoes. I wonder if maybe I can put my car into neutral and just sort of roll back down this hill, but as I’m wondering that last thing, a truck pulls up behind me.
“Thank you,” I whisper out loud to no one. I take a deep breath and look at it in my rear-view mirror, a green truck with something written across the front.
US FOREST SERVICE.
My heart beats a little bit faster, even as I remind myself that I’m literally in the middle of a national forest, that forest rangers are thick on the ground out here, that there’s a billion of them and the chances of this being one particular ranger are very, very slim.
The truck door opens.
A bearded man gets out.
Not this, I silently beg the universe. Not today. Please?
I unbuckle and turn around in the driver’s seat, leaning through the gap between the front two seats so I can see him better, but before I can be really, truly, 100% sure, he opens the rear door of the truck and leans in.
This lasts for several minutes, me leaning so far through my seats that I’m practically in the back seat of my car, the bearded forest ranger rummaging through his back seat, stomping around and doing something that I can’t quite see.
Finally, he closes the door. He’s now wearing thigh-high rubber boots over his work pants and shoulder-length thick rubber gloves over a white undershirt, his unruly hair knotted at the back of his head.
It’s him.
It’s definitely, one hundred percent, not-a-smidge-of-doubt-in-my-mind him.
The shirt is soaked through from the rain, clinging to every muscle and ripple on his tall, broad frame. My mouth goes dry and adrenaline shoots through my veins, because he looks very good right now and I look very not-good, oh, and also, I’m trapped inside a car during a rainstorm and it’s not my favorite way to spend an afternoon.
