In last night’s rain there were great rumbles. The rain fell in such volume and for so long that I walked through the basement to be assured there was no seepage. (There was none.) And then there was a great big, deep boom. The walls shook. The windows rattled. You could feel it in your chest.
I dug up a lightning map and found recorded lightning strikes all over the place. One was about 1.16 miles away, off to the left of the house as I type. But there was another one, just a half-mile away, and to my immediate front from where I am sitting. And maybe it seems silly, but it felt the energy and the sound came from that direction.
That lightning struck in the fields just behind one of the farmhouses, and if the people that live there were home last night it probably scared them to death, too. Today, we drove by there and, for the briefest glimpse it looks like you can see a big scorch mark in the earth.
This is not the closest I’ve been to a lightning strike. Once, several years ago, we were in a restaurant where a power pole outside took a hit. I happened to be facing that way. Everything turned green for a moment. On a map, we were probably sitting about 115 feet from that one, which was intimidating enough.
Not all lightning strikes are created the same, of course, and I would hazard a guess that the one last night was more powerful. There’s such a thing as a superbolt, which meteorologists and physicists estimate can transmit 10 billion and 1 trillion watts of electrical power, but they’re rare. So there’s variety. The one last night was a lot more powerful than my restaurant experience.
I read once that one of my great-grandfathers was hit by lightning. Or, at least, a man with his name. (How many Horaces could there be in one newspaper’s coverage area at any given time?) Whoever it was, the man was walking through his field on a Friday evening in the summer of 1959, the community correspondent wrote, and he was knocked down, but was not seriously hurt. We’ll never know, but I’m guessing he was close to a strike. And it probably wasn’t like the one we experienced last night that felt like an earthquake.
That’s a shot from puttering around in the backyard. We’re just about at the end of the season for puttering around in the backyard, I fear.
Because of the drought and the dryness of everything we haven’t used the fire pit the first time this fall. I keep accumulating fuel for the pit. I need to burn some of it. So I’m wondering, what is the precise window for this? Cool enough to enjoy a fire, not so cold to suffer while having to get one started?
It says here, 45 degrees. So maybe in the daytime, then. It may be nighttime temps like that. It got to 40 degrees last night. Who wants to set up tender and kindling when it is five degrees below the ideal temperature to do so? Especially when it’s nice and warm, inside, just 70 feet away.
