I love lightning,
…the initial, almost blinding, pure bright light, followed by the ear-shattering sounds which resonate in the air like crashing symbols, the raw destructive power of nature as old as time, itself.
I am scared shitless around lightning.
I know, that might sound more than a tad bit contradictory.
Having worked very closely to lightning my entire career as a wildland firefighter, in areas prone to late summertime thunderstorms, I have chased forest fires—sometimes for weeks—that began as a simple, lone lightning strike. In 1988, I spent an entire month on the Clover Mist fire in northern Yellowstone National Park, which burned over 400,000 acres—at the time, the largest fire ever in the lower 48.
My respect for lightning may have something to do with my summer as a lowly firefighter in the San Bernardino National Forest, back in 1970. One afternoon, we were on patrol looking for any fires resultant of a thunderstorm going through the area.
While my Fire Captain (a.k.a Foreman) sat behind the steering wheel with the safety of rubber-tired insulation in the light green pickup pumper truck, I was on foot, walking through the brush and timber looking for any small wisps of smoke that would reveal a recent fire start, when I saw the flash of the lightning strike at the exact same time I heard the thunder.
The rule of thumb to determining how many miles a thunder strike is away from you is to divide the time between the lightning and the thunder by five, so given the instantaneous occurrence, carry the zero, the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second, multiply by one, the speed of sound at 343.2 meters per second at 20 °C and then divide by…HOLY SHIT THAT WAS CLOSE!
As I made my way back to the relative safety of the truck cab, in what you might say was lightning swiftness, I had to wait until my Foreman was able to contain his hysterical laughter, so he could revel having just seen me—in what he claims—was my covering a span of about 50 yards without once ever touching the ground.
Ha, ha, ha…very effing funny…
When I saw the headline the other day about some guy recently getting a severe electrical shock in a national park located in California, I thought that odd, as you don’t often see lightning producing thunderstorms in northern California in the middle of winter.
But, then I read that this particular form of lightning happened to come from a hand-held device.
“A man walking his dogs in a federal park was hit with a stun gun…by a park ranger who accused him of not putting a leash on the animals.”
At first glance, this seemed somewhat harsh, until I read the explanation given by the officials.
“It appears the incident began as one of several educational contacts that day about the NPS rules on dog-walking.”
Wow, that sounds like Dick Cheney style “education.”
The official reiterated why the park ranger jolted the guy with 50,000 (500,000…5 million?!?) volts smack in his back, by saying,
“The ranger was trying to educate residents about the leash requirement.”
Hey, at least that is less than the 100 million (1 billion?!?) volts in a lightning bolt.
So, Virgil, if you’re out there somewhere, reading this…it really wasn’t all that funny if you were the one trying to outrun a gazillion volt blast up the ass.
O.K. maybe in hindsight it was a little funny.
