At the boat landing I'm deciding whether or not to launch. The four guys ahead of me have their boat in the water, but tied off to the dock, and from the access road behind us, another rig is pulling in. For a pucker brush lake it's rather popular this evening, which is odd.
As a group we all seem surprised at what's happening in the sky. Directly above us is blue sky and sunshine, but to the north over the lake's far shore are foaming black clouds with a laser light show and rumbling thunder. Cloud-to-cloud lightning sears the air.
Across half the water's surface white caps are whipped up and rushing towards us. But it's just half the lake. The sky has half a storm.
Nobody asks anybody else's name, but we all stare at the sky, we talk about fishing and where we live. Nobody has met each other before and our little newly formed group is not in a big hurry to hit the water with what's frothing in front of us.
We wonder is half the lake gonna shut the fish bite off. Which half? The big orange lightning flashes, we all, in unison point, so nobody would miss a glimpse of it, like that would happen. But from me, being just me, now in a half a storm, I'm part of them, we're us.
And if any of us had any brains we'd leave or take cover, but it's like watching a train wreck, that we can't take our eyes off. We can point to the edge of the rain and the wind. We're not getting wet but it's raining just over there. It's as if were watching a weather movie and we just don't have any popcorn.
The storm is roaring, the clouds just turn themselves inside out and upside down as they tumble across the sky changing colors of grey, only they have a brilliant blue sky edge with sunshine that for the only time in my life I'm not getting soaked in, and the other guys agree.
We also agree it's probably one of the weirdest things we've ever seen, and possibly one of the coolest things we've ever watched. And not to push our luck, we all stay on shore. In 45 minutes it was over. The entire sky went blue; then we all went back to just being fishermen.
The trout whisperer