I haven’t seen lightning storms in April before and this is the hardest I’ve ever seen it rain for an extended time, bar one experience (a tropical storm from Atlanta to Savannah). I came towards Des Moines in the indigo latest of twilights, in flashes of spray and quick panics of lost lane markers and drifting trucks.

The lightning is nowhere near white, but against the heavy navy backdrop pinkish purple, and flits and sputters across the horizon and the bowl above me, randomly. I can’t hear the thunder over the road noise. I want to roll a window down but for obvious reasons do not. As it gets darker my headlights catch the drops, a strobe-like effect, freezing them into millions and millions of glass spears. It gets harder to see, yet harder; tufts of rain curtain across the highway like snowdrifts.

I wait and wait and finally the mephitic sodium glare of the city’s emerging aura is welcome.

The Ramada where I’m staying is nearly empty. The clerk at the front desk is incogruously queeny, with an outragously affected lisp that makes me think he might understand a sideways remark. I hate affiliation but I’m always looking for someone who gets it.

“It is always like this here?” I ask.

But he just stares at me blankly and gives me my key card. On my dizzying way to my room, through a lot of corridors and rooms with lots of patterns and colors, I encounter a couple of women coming dripping from the hotel pool. I consider asking them if they’ve just been outside, but realize my remark is annoying.

In my room the spell of the storm is broken but I do hear the thunder for the first time.

The Internet connection is the best yet I’ve found and I quickly find that it’s raining and inch an hour here.