On this warm September day, there weren’t any spiders. There wasn’t any traffic either. On really windy days, guys would bring their model sailplanes out and let them ride the thermals. But there weren’t any remote control pilots either. Just the three boys and Dad, driving to Del Valle. On a school day? It was odd, but then again, so were our lives.

               Dad did have one rule that day: get your homework done BEFORE putting one toe in the lake. And, believe you and me, getting your homework done at the edge of a lake where your littlest brother is already playing in the water? That’s a motivator if ever there was one. Naturally, James, the little bookworm he was, finished before me. I still had Algebra, and I was half interested in the problems. I was more interested in the water in front of me.

               James and Jon were soaked, and James wanted me in the water with him. I wanted in the water, too, but Dad said I needed to finish. So I did. Just not as good as I could’ve done. I wrote answers just to have the blanks filled in. The last three answers were dead wrong, but I didn’t care. I wanted to swim. I really wanted to splash James and Jon.

               I folded my college-ruled paper with my math solutions into my book, running to the water after tossing my t-shirt on the shore, almost on our towels. I missed the three towels a lot, but I didn’t care. Water!

               I jumped in headfirst, and the water stung my eyes. The cold water was refreshing. That’s when I noticed what my brothers had not: a long piece of wood on the edge of the shoreline, a few feet away from our spot on the beach. It looked like a loose plank from one of the docks at the lower end of the lake. Dad preferred taking us to the upper part of the lake. I’m not sure if it was out of habit or because it was safer. That didn’t matter. What mattered was I had a gigantic surfboard I could take across the lake. I wasn’t sure how far it was to the other side, but I didn’t care. I was going for it.

               James saw me dragging this two-by-eight, ten-foot plank into the water. And, like little brothers do, he decided it would be his mission to join me on my adventure across the lake. He climbed on the front part of the board, me on the back. And we paddled our arms off, traversing the lake. It wasn’t far across the water, maybe a mile and a half. But for young adventurers like us? It felt like forever. We saw the black clouds overhead before we could make it all the way. We were almost there, and Dad started yelling at us to return. His voice echoed across the empty lake. We were the only people crazy enough to be on the water that day.

               Then we saw it. Flashes of lightning. Peals of thunder. Getting closer and closer by the minute. The clouds overhead getting darker and darker. James was on the back now, me at the front. Paddling like a madman, I did all I could to find the strength to reach the shoreline before the rain hit us. We felt it cool off by fifteen degrees in a matter of minutes. On the water, that air temperature made us shiver! Now it was freaking cold! A few minutes earlier, it was 88 degrees. Now it felt like it was in the upper 50s.

               Jon was panicking for us. It didn’t help that we still needed to grab all our stuff from the beach, towels, t-shirts, and shoes, and get into the truck. That included our notebooks, books, and backpacks. James got off the board after me, tossing it in the sand as I scrambled to collect my things. And, just as we were getting in the truck’s cab, the rain started. The dark clouds spit a few drops, then opened up in a torrent. We would’ve been soaked if we had been in it for a few seconds. We barely made it out, getting a little wet, but not all that much. We were wetter from the lake than from the rain!

               The lightning lit up the skies as we drove the thirty minutes home. It took longer than usual, the storm raining so hard that we couldn’t see in front of the truck at fifteen miles an hour. Dad tuned the AM radio between stations so we could listen to the lightning strikes as we watched the light flashing! It’s pretty cool seeing and hearing the lightning.

               Driving home, we rode past Lawrence Livermore Lab and saw a grass fire. We all assumed it was due to the lightning but thought that the security at the lab should know what was up. As Dad pulled up to tell the guard, we heard a firetruck heading toward the fire as the rain poured in through the driver’s side window. The guard thanked my Dad, and we headed home, never knowing if the fire was contained.               

That was the last time James and I swam during a lightning storm.