18–21 September 2026 · Playa Toluca, El Salvador
September is the back end of the rainy season on this coast, and it behaves like it. The first big storm of the stay, on the 2nd and 3rd, took the power out for about thirteen hours. On the 18th I filmed another one coming through at night from the patio. Neither was a warm-up for the 20th.
That night, Sunday, the thunder over Playa Toluca was not a cell passing through. It was sustained, and it went on. I recorded five clips between five past ten and twenty past, 168 seconds in all. The video came out black, because there was nothing to see but dark, so what I have is thunder and only thunder. The fourth clip is the big one. In the morning I wrote it down the way it landed: "The duration intensity of thunder last night was crazy!"
When it was over I found two other people had been out in it. Neither was paying.
The first was a Halloween land crab, black shell and purple legs, tucked under the pipe on the patio wall. I have met one before. The first went for my heels at dusk on the 7th, and a few days later I found what I took to be its den, between two river stones at the base of the lime tree. As far as I have read, these crabs burrow a metre or two down, and come up at dusk and after rain. That is this crab's whole schedule: it waits for the weather and then comes out. Tonight the weather had come to it.
The second was a tacuazín, the local opossum, back on the block wall under the water main, and soaked through. It is the same species as the pair that were in the roof the first night, and the one that came into the kitchen on the 16th and left under its own power once I opened the door. From what I have read, opossums are largely resistant to pit-viper venom and eat ticks, scorpions and snakes. With a scorpion already found on the bedroom floor, I am prepared to be generous to it.
The morning after, I put it in the diary in one line: "Everyone trying to escape the rains." The crab and the opossum had both come up onto the patio for the same reason. Crab, opossum and thunder, one night and one patch of concrete under the eaves.
Ledger: five clips of thunder, no picture. Two wet guests on the patio, neither paying.