Once the weather had moved on, I took my recording indoors and reviewed the sounds feverishly. So many stomps and growls, so much variety! It was a challenge, but eventually I was able to isolate one single thunderous clap which intrigued me more than the others. It felt important that I simplify the storm in this way.

My chosen thunderclap was not a simple one. As it spoke, it twisted and twined around itself. Every time my ears tried to make sense, they managed to discern yet another quality. All of those qualities, originally obscured by the storm’s noisy rage were at once a kind of unpacking and also an act of building something.

In the end, I decided that this thunderclap would be my pet.

By now I was more ambitious. I imagined myself host to more of these thunderclaps, others very much like this one. In my mind I composed a veritable family, roaming — from one end to another — across a dell all their own. I dreamed I could simply walk from my humble urban home to that high place of claps, and there wet my eyes with their orchestral voices, and imagine all the while that my urban home was in some honest way extendable from there to here. How pleased my pet thunderclap would be, exulting at the center of this tribe of sisters! My excitement grew.

But the prospect was demanding, to be sure, since it dared engage the very breadth and length of New England. And what a strange effort this would be! Much as I tried, I couldn’t quite envision myself imposing on so many people the sound of this precious thunderclap, followed by my questioning: “Does this clap sound familiar to you ? Do you think you might’ve heard it before, something like this?” There was an uncomfortable audacity to this idea: that a young man should tramp himself from town to town and demand answers of absurd exactitude from people who probably had never thought before to discriminate thunderclaps so personally. And once such thoughts had been moved into being by me, they’d then inevitably move their new bodies quickly into other realms, birthing thoughts that were themselves possessed of the dreadful power to bite and corrupt and break me down. No tongues would be necessary for the speaking of such words; eyes and gestures would serve the words’ purpose quite adeptly. The clever movements of newly possessed human bodies would turn the air between us into little weapons, pins and darts, from them to me.

No. It was out of the question, all of it.

My thunderclap was disappointed; it cried in my arms. For myself, I strove for the best of views, thinking: We’ve found each other, this thunderclap and I, and that’s enough. I was sure that my thunderclap and I had always belonged together—one for the other and not a third personality to divide us. We’d grow old together.