Lightning Days

Rain on Sunday. It came toward the end of a hot and sticky day, so uncomfortable that we passed on the Long Grove Strawberry Festival, which we enjoyed last year. But we couldn’t see putting up with the drive and the heat and the crowd and the toddler. The prospect of strawberry cake doughnuts from the Long Grove Confectionery and good amateur entertainment just wasn’t enough to get us there.

Around 7 in the evening, I was sitting outside reading, enjoying the decline of a hot day. I started hearing occasional rumbles of thunder, which was odd because it was cloudy only in one corner of the sky. At first I thought it was airplane noise. Later, some clouds moved overhead, and the noise was clearly thunder, but it still didn’t look like rain. A good two-thirds of the horizon seemed clear, and the overcast parts weren’t all that dark. Still, low rumblings continued.

So much so that Yuriko came outside and asked me to come in, worried that lightning might do me harm. I wasn’t worried, since the clouds didn’t seem too vicious, and I hadn’t seen any lightning, even within the clouds. But one should have deference to wifely concerns of that kind, so I came inside. I would have been driven in anyway, since three or four minutes later the skies opened up and rain poured for about half and hour.

I can remember being really in danger of a lightning strike only a few times, since I usually take the risk seriously enough to get out of its way. There was the time at the Singapore Zoo in '91, described here (see April 4, 2003).

In the summer of ’82, most of which I spent at summer school in Nashville, I was on the Vanderbilt campus one cloudy day when the sky grew angry, but not rainy. Instead of taking refuge inside Furman Hall, I stood at its entrance, looking up at the clouds. At least one other person was there, a fellow named Larry who’d lived across from me during my first year at school. We weren’t completely unprotected -- a college campus isn’t a golf course, and there were trees and other buildings nearby. Still, the crackle of lightning seemed awfully close, immediately overhead. We stayed for a few minutes, fascinated by the overhead display.

When it seemed to be over, Larry said, “Wow, that was dangerous, wasn’t it?” I agreed and we went on our way. I never had all the foolhardiness you’re supposed to have at 21, but I guess I had some. The lightning could have taken me out, too, since that summer seemed to be open season on Vanderbilt students. By the end of September, one had committed suicide, another had been shot to death in a bar near campus, and two more -- kids that I knew -- had died in a helicopter crash. No one was hit by lightning, however.