Cyde Weys Musings

Many children are afraid of lightning. I suppose they share something in common with dogs in that regard. I was not one of these canine-like children. At least, not until the neighbor’s tree was struck by lightning, that is.

I don’t exactly remember now the year in which it happened, but I was probably seven or eight. We were sitting around in the family room watching television during a torrential downpour. It was around dusk. Then suddenly we heard a stupendous boom, and the entire room lit up with a flash. A frantic panic broke out, with my parents running around trying to ascertain if our house had been struck. I’m sure that my sister and I were crying. We finally figured out that it was the neighbor’s tree, just a few feet across the property line and in direct line of sight to our family room, that had been hit. The strike caused enough damage that our neighbor had to bring in insurance adjusters.

From then on I was terrified of lightning storms, and would always insist on weathering them out in the basement, in the middle of the room, away from electrical outlets, metal objects, and windows. I became a snivelling keraunophobiac. My parents tried to console me, telling me that old wives’ tale about how “lightning doesn’t strike twice”, and how, for all practical purposes, the tree that was struck was close enough to our house to extend that protection to our house as well. I tried to gain some solace from that, but even at that young age, I yearned for a real scientific reason as to why this might be so, but could come up with nothing. Nevertheless, the house was not struck again, and we moved out around the time I turned nine.

Fast forward to eighth grade. I no longer insisted on weathering out storms in the basement; my fear of lightning had abated somewhat. I was working on a semester-long computer science project, complete with a final deliverable consisting of a boxed copy with disk and user manual. My partner and I were developing a game in Java called “Tern Overgul” (and if you search the web hard enough, you may still be able to find it). Our teacher was big on preparing us for the responsibility of high school, and given that this was a semester-long project, he figured that we had more than enough time to complete it. There would be absolutely no extensions, he said, and he was proud to boast that he had never granted one. Either you paced yourself over the course of the semester to finish that game on time or you turned in whatever you had when the due date arrived and your grade suffered for it.

My aunt, uncle, and cousin came to visit about a week before the end of the semester. It was growing late in the evening, and my cousin had already gone to bed. Montgomery Count was experiencing a pretty vicious Spring thunderstorm. Now regardless of whether you believe the old wives’ tale or not, once you move to a new house, all bets are off. And damned if Zeus wasn’t going to take full advantage of that. Apparently that lightning bolt a few years earlier was naught but a practice shot, because he nailed us dead-on with his second attempt.

The lightning struck the chimney, exploding it and sending jagged brick shrapnel flying up to fifty feet away, gouging holes in the roof and balcony and shattering car windows. Some of the electricity traveled to ground through the steel drainpipes, charring them black and forcibly peeling them away from the sides of the house like metal bananas. The siding melted and singed. The electricity also traveled through our electrical circuits and phone wires, blowing out every television set that we had, most of the fuses in the circuit breaker, and the wiring of many of the circuits themselves. Although we had unplugged our computer when the storm started, we hadn’t disconnected the phone cable from the modem. The electrical surge didn’t waste that opportunity, destroying the modem, printer port, and other components in the computer.

But more than anything else, the direct strike was loud. I was in a daze for a few seconds, my ears ringing, and my mind struggling to comprehend what had just happened. When you hear a lightning strike happen off in the distance, you know exactly what it is. But when a lightning strike happens to you, the character of it is so different that it more resembles a high yield explosion than a thunderous reverberating crackling. I also hadn’t previously appreciated that something could be so bright that its light reflecting off nearby objects could make it seem as if the entire world was glowing. Yet somehow my cousin, who was sleeping just feet away from the point of the strike in an upstairs bedroom, did not wake.

After all the excitement subsided, the firefighters left, and we finally got on with our lives, the insurance company had to pay out over a hundred thousand dollars to replace the roof, siding, wiring, televisions, drainpipes, windshields, balcony, and of course, chimney. The official insurance forms came back listing the cause of the damage as, and I quote verbatim, “an act of God”. (See, I told you Zeus had his hand in this.) Somehow the nerds at the computer repair shop managed to salvage the computer, though they had to add in a couple of PCI cards to replace the fried components on the motherboard. By the time the computer came back from the repair shop, though, our semester-long computer science project was due. All of my work had been on the computer, and we didn’t get it back in time. So I wasn’t ready to turn in the project. And There Were No Extensions.

On the due date, the teacher collected the final boxed products from the class. I sat through what seemed like an eternity of other people turning their projects in. He called the names of my partner and I. Luckily, I was ready. I showed him photographs of the damage to the house and computer, copies of insurance forms, and a signed note from my parents saying that, yes, it had really happened; it wasn’t a “Zeus burnt up my homework” take on the old standby. He said it was the best excuse he had ever seen, and just this once, he broke his own policy. But how could he not have? Who he is he to argue with an act of God?

Curiously enough, after that, I wasn’t afraid of lightning ever again. How could I be? I had faced the beast, and lived to tell about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 18:52 and is filed under Personal. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.