Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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I could almost see my mother replaying all of these events in her mind as we stood in the trees. Hail bounced around our feet. The balls grew in size as the minutes passed, smacking our shoulders and jacket hoods relentlessly. The thunder and lightning were now simultaneous. My legs, bare beneath my shorts, quickly went numb, and within minutes there was almost an inch of slush around our feet. My light running shoes soaked through immediately. This was not the two-minute storm my grandfather had reported. I leaned up against the granite rock, then, noticing the black-and-white veins in it, pushed myself away, wondering if certain types of minerals and rocks attracted lightning.

Another flash-boom, so blinding and awful that I was tempted to fall on my knees and crawl away—where? There was no escaping this.

“Look!” my mom exclaimed, pointing up the ridgeline.

Above us, about a hundred feet away, a tree was softly smoking through the haze of hail.

Forty-five minutes had passed since we took shelter in the shoulder, and still the storm showed no sign of retreating. Each time it seemed as though the storm was getting further away, a new round of lightning would roll in. Too scared to touch our phones, we had not tried to contact my dad to see if he had managed to get to safety. We stood in four inches of hail slush, and I was beginning to feel feverish from the cold. The only purpose our rain jackets really served anymore was lessening the impact of the hail on our skin.