Rainstorm

We were barely married---I think it was the Wednesday after our Saturday wedding---when we stopped to eat in Oklahoma. Married in Massachusetts, we spent a little over a day there before climbing into Ruthie, our pickup truck, for the drive to New Mexico and my husband's new job.

Driving cross-country gave us a needed breather from the activity of the last few weeks. The previous few weeks had been nonstop. The end of graduate school for him simply gave way to other concerns. We were preparing for a wedding and a move. Three life-altering events in a short span of time, plus visiting relatives, final details, and the wedding itself, drained us of energy. Leaving might have been harder if we weren't so happy to get away from everything and leave the recent insanity behind.

The trip was enjoyably relaxing. We fed squirrels at rest stops, made bets on how the distance to the horizon, and made fun of our less-stellar lodgings. We laughed a lot, and kept the windows open to keep cool in the June heat. The stress we had been carrying vanished and we received the breather we needed with lightheartedness.

This was our state of mind by the time we reached Oklahoma City for dinner. We were together, we were happy, life was good. Our plan was to drive through the Texas Panhandle to Amarillo and find somewhere to stop and sleep. We had time enough to get there before it became late.

As we drove through Oklahoma, we noticed that evening's sunset had an unsettling green tinge to it. We realized the wind had picked up, and a storm cloud appeared to be following us as we drove. We joked about the weather pursuing us, but that went from being funny to being prophetic. The skies released a torrential quantity of rain that pounded on the pickup and reduced our visibility to less than fifteen feet. My husband told me June is tornado season, and we were in Tornado Alley, where the greatest number of them occur. I became really frightened.

The sky lit up with huge bursts of cloud-to-cloud lightning, a stunning display that alllowed us to see what was happening outside. Once we saw a fire burning, caused by a lightning strike. Another explosion of light gave us a view of a funnel cloud that was, fortunately, not touching ground. The idea of being caught in a twister was terrifying, and I clung tight to my belief that twisters happened to other people, not to us. We stopped under a bridge to wait out the weather, but that was just as hazardous. Interstate 40 was well-traveled, especially by semi trailers, and the low visibility combined with the shelter of that bridge put us at risk of being struck. With no better alternatives available, we pushed on.

By this point, we had been in the panhandle for a while, and I was actively searching for somewhere closer than Amarillo to spend the night.
While much of what was available appeared as little specks on the map, one speck was slightly larger.I decided we should go there, so we followed the road to Shamrock, Texas.

Shamrock, Texas, is a much more developed place now, but at the time there was little there that we could see but rusting oil field equipment and...motels! Motels offering low rates, their parking lots sprinkled with semis. We chose one that offered firm beds, and pulled into the parking lot to get a room.

The proprietor was a small, energetic man who swiftly rented us a room. We got our key and rushed past the former swimming pool---now a flower bed---and into shelter. The owner came and made the air conditioner function, then left. Relieved to be indoors, we began winding down for the evening. My better half intended to shower first, and started to the bathroom. That was when we made our first discovery. The bathroom was stocked with the trial size soaps and shampoos available in grocery stores everywhere. It was a small place and the economy was understandable. The shower curtain, however, went beyond economical and over into cheap. The curtain wasn't actually a curtain at all, but a length of sheet plastic, cut to exactly the top of the bathtub. We were amazed or maybe amused...probably both. So, chuckling, we returned to our plan.

The next hour brought similar discoveries. The air conditioner didn't function very well, and the television offered two channels, one of them in Spanish. My favorite was the bed. There was nothing wrong with the bed itself and there was even the promised firm mattress. Everything surrounding the bed, however, boasted no interior decorating skills whatsoever. First was the lamp, which was on the wall directly over the center of the bed, with the cord stapled to the wall. That light was obviously there to stay. The room had been wallpapered with a textured paper, and might have been attractive at one time. Unfortunately, someone had decided to paint the room green without stripping the wallpaper first. It had been painted over, and the fact that the paper came only halfway up the wall added to the bizarre appearance. The painter also painted over part of the cord for the bed's lamp, giving it a vibrant Teal shade against unpainted white.

This was too ludicrous for belief. We just couldn't help ourselves. We laughed and laughed, not holding anything back. We howled and shook with tears running down our faces until we finally stopped. Even then, we would spontaneously erupt with laughter until we finally calmed down enough to sleep.

Everything ended well. We dumped about ten gallons of water out of our tarp the next morning and very little was actually wet. The storm was gone and warm sunshine greeted us. New Mexico was only a state away. Best of all, the fear we encountered from that night's thunderstorm had evaporated with the laughter of the night before. Once again, we were together we were happy and life was good.