we woke up around 3 o'clock AM-what a thunderstorm! I never heard such thunder! I laid in bed thinking of the Day of Judgment-scary (Hebrews 12:18-24)

Whoops! Thought I had already responded to this: I guess I just thought it out in my head when I intended to get right back to my journal after reading my mail. Yes, I can see from this image that Holland got hammered: maybe even more than Milwaukee after the storm had a chance to pick up energy from the Lake. But a week later, now, I find that it just sort of whet my appetite for another good Midwestern storm!

They make out wee infrequent (like, once a year maybe) rumbles of thunder pale in insignificance! Although I think I was in ones that big in Yosemite and in the Dordogne region of France.

I certainly can't say anything about France, but I don't know if Yosemite could conjure anything like this up. The thunderstorms we get in the Midwest are pretty distinct from anything like what you can get on the East or the West Coasts. People who move here from the coasts really freak out when they experience their first big one because it's so much more powerful, with all our "Tornado Alley" energy. I had a professor at Notre Dame from Seattle, who was of course then very familiar with rain, and who did her doctorate in New York City. The first major Midwestern thunderstorm she experienced, she ran out of her house in the middle of the night because she thought something had exploded in the neighbourhood: that's how different the degree of the thunder was from anything she'd ever heard. She told me that it took her a few years to stop being really scared of them and to acclimatize and treat them like we do: like a kind of natural fireworks display – something to go out onto your porch at watch. (Unless it gets really dangerous.)

The one the other night had an almost continuous occurrence of lightning going on in the heart of it: I had never seen anything like it. It wasn't like the electrical storms you get occasionally with lightning coming down everywhere: those are crazy dangerous. This was more like a constant, almost strobe-like flashing of light up in the center of the storm in the clouds, not a constant ground-to-sky lightning (although there was plenty and to spare of that).

The one in France had the strobe lightening thing going on for quite a bit, but the one in Yosemite could just have seemed bigger since it was echoing all round the valley walls and lightening was striking the walls and making rocks fall. It sounded like an express train going past the tent all night! I'd like to see one of yours someday.