Lightning

One of our dogs is terrified of thunder - if he is outside. He stays relatively calm if he is indoors while it is thundering. I guess he knows instinctively what our mother used to tell us boys: come inside you hear thunder. 

Good advice. If you hear thunder, the lightning is close enough to be dangerous to you. 

One summer day in the late sixties, a large group of us went to the lake to ski – well, the others went to ski. I mostly went to watch the girls get wet. “It came up a cloud” (as we say in the South).

The power-company owned lake was not surrounded by upscale housing – upscale docks, yes, but not housing. Some rustic cabins. Mostly, though, old trailers that had been towed to the lakeshore and put on blocks. Electricity and indoor plumbing but that was about it. 

The host’s trailer was way too small for all of us to take shelter inside when it began to rain. But who minds rain when you are already wet from being in the lake? 

Then the lightning started. Close. Thunder peals were deafening. We crowded inside the best we could.

And then lightning struck somewhere close. Doug (not his real name) had been standing in the doorway, leaning against the metal jamb. He hit the floor. He turned bluish and foamed at the mouth. I had seen this before – when my just-crawling brother had picked up an extension cord that was plugged into the wall and put the other end in his mouth. And then licked it. 

No lasting damage to him, but a nasty shock. Same with Doug, fortunately. He caught his breath, someone rushed him to the doctor and all turned out well. 

He ate a lot less dinner than the rest of us, though. LIghtning had left him queasy. For a few days afterwards at school, we watched to see if his eyes glowed or his fingers sparked and then we forgot about it.

Thunderstorms this summer reminded me though, these forty-plus years later. So when I hear thunder I make sure I’m heading indoors.

Even indoors is not safe enough according to my mother and her lady friends. They wouldn’t go to the bathroom when it was thundering. Mom nearly stroked when she once realized that I actually had taken a bath during a thunderstorm. 

She also turned off all the lights during storms and would not sit near anything electrical (even if they were unplugged). Her reason was two previous encounters will ball lightning. Now there are different accounts of what that is – and differing opinions about whether it even exists. But she had two encounters with something.

The first, she said, was when lightning struck two trees in the yard. They had a metal clothesline running between them and whether one tree was struck or both were - both had the scars to prove something happened. Vertical wounds that looked like something had taken a slice out of each of them. (Dad moved the clothesline.) 

When the trees where slashed by heavenly fire I was sitting in my highchair. Mom said blue, fiery spheres came out of the wall, rolled down to the floor, across the floor – and that I was sitting in the highchair watching the light show while she screamed and ran to her baby.

Her second encounter was similar but there was no nearby lightning strike (that she knew of) and she was home alone. Different room. Thunderstorm. Blue fire ball out of an electrical outlet, rolling across the floor to disappear in a sizzle. 

Whatever happened, the outlet never worked again. But then, it may never have worked before. Since Dad would only let us plug in one thing at a time, it was hard to tell. it wasn’t near the television.

Copyright Roger Hoyt Ard June 2011