A fist of thunder slams on the tin roof overhead. Lightning breaks on the hyacinth choked lake shrouded in a rainy curtain. The storm rolls like a saxophone frenzy. Only the wildness can tame itself, in time with its own exhaustion. We will sit, cook supper, and wait.

Early this afternoon, fat clouds piled into one another like stalled buses. Then the breeze arrived- a respite from the tropical gauzy wet heat. Leaves flutter like bird wings.

We packed into the van, six of us with two Javanese servants, for the ride out of Jakarta to Pamela’s village house. A pinging on the roof brightened my face. I waited like an impatient child for a rainstorm in this lush land. Weaving smokey traffic thinned as we turned onto a dirt road.

Pam, the wild child, landed here in Indonesia for a job at the diplomatic school teaching dance and P.E. Her new husband Jeff teaches art at the same school. If it wasn’t for her, Jean and I may never have met. She vacated a room in a shared house in Del Mar that sat high up on the far side of a steep hill overlooking the Pacific. That was ten years ago now. I answered a small, classified ad: “Roommate Wanted” in the local weekly The Real Paper.  Cycling down the Coast Highway to Del Mar, I pushed up that giant hill, pedaling, sweating, and breathing hard. From the top of Torrey Pines Road, the light peered through a break in cloud cover. A spotlight on the rippling sea.

It was Jean, my future bride, who interviewed me and gave me the green light to move in. Pamela and Jean go way back as friends. Back to the East Coast where all four of us hail from.  Jean, with sun kissed shoulders and teal blue eyes, escorts me upstairs and out onto the flat roof over the garage. We have a wide view west of the vast Pacific. Now, here we are, on a new adventure halfway around the globe.

Rain pummels and flows in muddy red streams rushing along the narrow roadside.  Rice and banana trees sway with storm breezes. Winds seem to swirl from different directions – pushed by dancing hands of deities.

The air is scented smooth and musty, feels steamy on one’s cheek. Grasses shine under darkened light – greens brighten like emerald fingers. Rust colored murky puddles span the roadside. Weary storefronts, homes, sag under crashing black skies.

Schoolchildren in white shirts and blue skirts duck under overhangs, smiling at one another. Thunder clouds hide the features of the landscape. Bare feet stand in red puddles growing white and soft as dough. Sleepy eyes lull in the shadows of the storm.

We huddle, dry and secure with Allah at the wheel. Further on, kids play soccer in a slick earth field. Laughing screams fly in the rain.

The Javanese people are fearful of storms and cool night breezes. They say, “the wind gets in” and causes sickness. Men hold cardboard and newspapers aloft as they barefoot home.

Rain splatters about. We roll and bump over muddy ruts watching the village people return from a day in the rice fields.

Earlier Jean, Pamela, and I were walking from the lake house in Java to meet Jeff with his driver in their Jeep. Leaving the house, where that morning I was awakened before sunrise to the sound of chanting, the Call to Prayer drifting from the mosque on the far side of the lake.

Rain fell suddenly again.  Then came the surprise. As we huddled under a tin roof porch beside the muddy red road, a Mercedes drove slowly towards us. In the back seat Laura spotted Muhammed Ali. He had visited the famous Ciputat  Mosque on the lake.

“Jeannie look!”

Pam bounces high, hands outstretched in yoga sun salutation, reaching for a sun beyond our nimbus ceiling. She then yells to him: “Santa Monica Gym 1984!”

Mr. Ali rolls his window down, smiles and waves to us. She last saw him in that gym. Now here we are halfway round the globe, six years later.