Blowfish Chronicles: Fortuitous Thunder

FRIDAY JUNE 20 v WILSON TOBS

 

 

 

Fortuitous Thunder

 

 

 

Despite fond memories of family vacations in national parks, I have never been one for mountains and forests and hiking and climbing and camping, favoring instead complacent walks in the company of trees in close proximity to houses. I even used to say that my idea of a great summer getaway was lying in bed with a big stack of magazines in a motel room with cable. Later, however, when my work began to require long hours of reading, I would rest my eyes on horizons, feeling a need for at least contemplative contact with life in the out of doors, and it has lately come to me as an indefatigable observer at the Cap that a baseball field is just the landscape for a man who wishes to commune with nature while keeping an eye on society. I mean society as it endeavors to maintain a public order against which continual challenges are mounted, challenges inflamed by taunting temptations tossed at subversives by a man on a miniature hill.

Led or let-down by its own most prominent member, society takes care of business, striking out three in a row, or falls apart, giving up endless hits and runs and bases on balls, throwing wild pitches in flurries, or develops or disintegrates to a degree somewhere between these two extremes during different delineated periods of time on any given evening.

This is the general idea. Here is a particular history. On the twentieth evening of June, on a field of constant green, under a sky fading in deepening twilight through shades of blue, to indigo, the society of our guys calmly suppressed a succession of subversives collectively known as the Tobs. This team, from the wilds of Wilson, North Carolina, was granted, in partial reparation for three runs scored by the Fish, one run of its own, in the fourth of five innings. Five innings are the minimum required for a “lead” to become a “win,” and so upon the completion of these five innings Fish manager Tim Medlin pointed out to an understanding ump the imminence of a storm.

It had been skulking around in fraught breezes since the bottom of the third. The infield tarp was trundled out and at first seemed merely precautionary, but forty minutes after the game was suspended ominous gusts of wind hurled down thunderous sheets of rain lit with bolts of lightening, and your bleacher-seat lover of nature was actually a little scared. It was hard to believe that during what turned out to be the last half-inning of the game I had been so mellow, thinking how neat the Tob T-shirts looked, applied like bright-yellow dabs of paint to complement the green.

Most people who had not left the stadium had repaired downstairs to the concourse, at the behest of the Blowfish announcer, who had encouraged their patronage of the vendors, and as I slipped down for a snack myself an atmosphere of cloistered conviviality reminded me of the feasting in the mead hall in Beowulf before its attack by Grendel.

But I was back at my perch when the storm hit, there to be refreshed by sprinkles that befell me through a porous roof, and along with ten or fifteen other dawdlers who had decided to seek shelter in view of the field, in the only seats with overhead protection, I moved around to avoid the wet gusts of wind loudly blowing in upon us from one side and then another. When the director of media relations offered us sanctuary in the press box, I took it, out of trepidation of the weather, to be sure, but also for a chance to see the field as seen each evening by the Blowfish impresarios. It is seen through panes of glass, with the acoustic surround of the park naught but ambient sound.  Now a partially shrouded wetland, the green was both diminished and enlarged, as if it were a picture of the out of doors on a panoramic screen, and looking out upon it, from within the box, with less peripheral vision, I was able to brave what remained of an angry preemption of the regularly scheduled programming.

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