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“Thunder rolls/And the lightnin’ strikes.
/Another love grows cold /On a sleepless night.” — Song lyrics by Garth Brooks
A storm rages as I’m drafting this column. Rain, wind, lightning, thunder. I don’t like lightning.
“It’s lightning! Get out of that tub now,” my grandmother was quick to announce when clouds arose.
Baths at her house in Pittsburg were playtime as a youngster, mainly because there was no waiting in line for the old-fashioned tub. However, bath time at home with two sisters meant waiting for the only bathtub in the house.
“Aren’t you done yet?” was the common Saturday night cry through the bathroom door. Except for that night in Seymour, when just about the time I settled in to soak in the bubbles, my mother burst through the door in a panic.
“Get dressed now.” Gillette commercials played on the television, meaning the Friday night fights were coming on. The siren at the fire station was blaring loudly.
“There’s a tornado coming,” Mom shouted.
“I’m wet,” I said, pleading. “No time,” she said. “Get dressed now. We have to get to the cellar.”
At the first flash of celestial electricity, warnings from parents or grandparents were the same. Granny dashed through the house, unplugging her electrical appliances — both of them: the Kelvinator refrigerator in the corner of the dining room and the radio in the living room.
“Don’t touch the faucets,” she said. “Get away from the windows, you’ll get struck.”
I knew only two people hit by lightning. I attended the first’s funeral service. The second laughs today when he relates his encounter with the phenomenon of nature.
Research reveals a one in 1.2 million chance of getting hit by lightning. That computes to 0.0000008%.
Your odds of winning in Las Vegas are better.
The chances of snapping a photo of a lightning bolt are good, however, if you know the trick. I read back in the ancient days of film photography how lightning storms follow a pattern of building, peaking and decreasing in a measurable cycle between discharges. One summer night, I tested that theory from an upper- story balcony of the Palacio del Rio Hotel in San Antonio on the River Walk. Timing the flashes and shooting long exposures on that cycle netted a halfdozen frames with decent images on a 36-exposure roll of Kodachrome.
Still hanging on my wall is the framed photo of a cloud-to-ground lightning bolt with the Tower of the Americas in the foreground.
One lightning bolt can reach more than 10 miles and scorch anything in its path with 50,000-degree temperatures. When lightning is about to strike, electricity fills the air. Metal objects, even jewelry, will sometimes buzz. Hair will stand on end.
Should you experience these signs, don’t wait for a warning. Need I say, seek shelter. Lightning can travel from the clouds, through your body and into the ground in about three milliseconds.
Which is what happened to the one person I know who was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.
It’s a funny story as he relates it. But Miles McCall, my friend and colleague from Stephen F. Austin State University teaching days, puts a positive spin on just about everything.
“I’ve been struck by lightning,” Miles casually said one day with a chuckle.
“I was sailing on Lake Sam Rayburn with some friends and their dog that day when a summer storm came up,” he said. (Miles loves sailboats). “Wisely, we headed for shore, arriving just as the storm hit. But unwisely, we sheltered under the first tree we came to. Smart, huh? All I remember after that was a brilliant flash and a deafening clap of thunder.”
Miles added, “A minute or so later, I looked around and all of my friends and the dog were lying on the ground. I thought, ‘Oh no, they’re dead.’ Then one of the guys got up and took off running, and I thought, ‘Oh no, they’re alive and I’m dead!’” “We were all OK,” Miles said. “Except the poor dog, he didn’t make it. The soles of our shoes were burned off and our feet blistered. Cracked earth and asphalt spread from the base of the tree in all directions.”
They surmised the charge hitting the tree and traveling out in the root system to them was their saving grace.
As I finish writing this afternoon, the rain, lightning and thunder have moved out of Center and that’s my saving grace.
Because I don’t like lightning. Not even writing about it.
— Contact Aldridge at [email protected]. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge. com
