The Strike
Adam O. Davis
In the beginning, there was the boom. The boom and then a black black as soot, black as pitch. Some God, as Sylvia Plath wrote, got hold of the roots of my hair and I, too, sizzled in blue volts—no desert prophet but a 14-year-old boy on the cusp of 10th Grade. But, really, the boom didn’t come first. And the first question I get when I tell anyone I was stuck by lightning is, invariably, Did it hurt? to which I say, Yeah, it did.
The odds of being struck by lightning are roughly 1 in 15,000 people. On average, 2,000 people are struck worldwide every year with only 10 percent of those struck being killed. Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is the world’s most lightning-struck place. According to a 2020 study by the National Lightning Safety Council, July is the most popular month for lightning fatalities, and you’re more likely to be struck on a weekend than during the week, making leisure the most potent denominator in potential lightning strikes. Men are more likely than women to be struck (79 percent vs. 21 percent), and of all those struck the majority will be in their twenties. Needless to say, being outdoors substantially raises your chances of being hit, especially fishing outdoors (as opposed, I suppose, to fishing indoors): lightning fatalities for fishers are four times higher than those for golfers who are erroneously believed to be sport’s truest lightning rods.
So before the boom, before the soot-and-pitch blackness, there was me, my dad, and my brother playing tennis in August 1995.
It was a warm afternoon, unusually humid for the high desert of Salt Lake City, the late-summer sky swollen with clouds that were dark but not threatening: no little flicker of lightning from them, no telltale spittle or rumble of an approaching storm. So we kept playing our three-person’d doubles—me to the north of the net, my dad and brother to the south. It wasn’t raining. There was no lighting. There was no reason to stop.
Sometimes lightning strikes where there should be no lightning, lashing out the back end of storm cloud and travelling up to 25 miles in less than a second. Say, for example, there’s a storm over LaGuardia Airport but blue skies in Newark—boom, in Jersey, out of the blue, a bolt.
Ever since Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, invented the thunderbolt, lightning has been a shorthand for wholesale illumination. Whether intellectual, physical, or spiritual, lightning (or, sometimes, simply lighting) is the lesson that changes us. At least that’s what our stories say: God, Medusa-like, warning Moses in thunder that no one should look upon him; Benjamin Franklin with his kite and key; Robert Redford’s wondrous baseball bat fashioned from a lightning-crippled tree; Michael J. Fox’s DeLorean powered by 1.21 gigawatts of juice transmitted from the Hill Valley clocktower; Boris Karloff’s piecemeal monster raised to life in Frankenstein . . . in all these instances and more lightning is often the violent vehicle of epiphany. The lesson being: What we are struck with we carry with us. Or, what we are struck with will carry us beyond ourselves.
On September 13th, 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont, Phineas Gage, an employee of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad Company, had a bad day. While working on a section of track, an accidental explosion drove a 13.25-pound iron tamping rod through his head. In a split-second, the rod blasted through his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, and rocketed through
ADAM O. DAVIS
his brain before landing 80 feet away. The force of the impact drove Gage’s skull briefly apart (only the elastic connective tissues around it kept the pieces in place), yet despite the severity of his injury, Gage was able to speak, walk, and not only survive the trip to the doctor but introduce himself by saying, “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” Miraculously, he soon regained his full health; however, reports indicate that his behavior changed as a result: before the accident he was known as a responsible and hardworking individual; after, according to his doctor, John Martyn Harlow, he became impulsive, “pertinaciously obstinate,” and “manifest[ed] . . . little deference for his fellows.” He did, however, make one lifelong friend—the tamping rod that nearly felled him. For years after his accident, Gage toured the world, giving talks with his constant companion in hand, that talisman that delivered him from every mundane expectation life might have held for him. Suddenly, in the middle of our game, my father and brother and I saw the light. The air broke like glass and I was stuffed so full of sound my skin nearly split. Everything turned black under that bomb-blast. Black as soot, black as pitch—no, even blacker: a black untouched ever by light. I saw somehow within my skull and inside its peerless privacy a hundred thousand sparks spat out. Those barnacles of light lit my brain like a switchboard. Have you ever gotten a static shock? I ask the person who asks me the question. Getting hit feels like a hundred thousand of those going off in your brain at once. But how long does it take for a hundred thousand shocks to go off? A handful of milliseconds. Maybe a double-handful. But it felt much longer. In the moment of my strike I worked on the lightning’s clock: Everything slowed to fractions of split-seconds as the voltage leisured through the folds of my brain and the ladder of my skeleton. My brother said I looked like the poster for Platoon, my arms flung skyward in a rictus of defeat.
According to the National Weather Service, there are five types of lightning strikes:
Direct Strike—exactly what it sounds like—from the sky straight to you.
Side Flash (aka Side Splash)—the bolt is transmitted through a taller object and into the person nearby (most likely what hit me).
Ground Current—the bolt moves through the object of its undertaking and charges the ground around it—this is what typically kills livestock in such large numbers.
Conduction—the bolt hits something metal which then becomes the path for its transmission—this is why you don’t take a shower or talk on a landline during a thunderstorm.
Streamers—the smaller filaments of electricity that branch out from the big bolt—let’s call it an indirect direct hit (another possibility for what hit me).
Lightning typically leaves its mark on skin in Lichtenburg figures, those fractal-like tattoos that vanish within a few days of the strike. Outside of fires, lightning leaves its mark on land in fulgurite, clumps or tubes of sediments fused together through the intense heat generated by a strike, not unlike the glassy shards of trinitite that are found following the detonation of an atomic bomb.
From within my skull’s immaculate dark I heard a scream. Small and shrill—an electrified falsetto that betrayed every iota of manhood my pubescent self had failed to incubate. I screamed high and long and when I quit I came to—that night I’d been in (Plath again) snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid—and I found myself on my back staring up at the sky. The violence whip-quick and gone. The air itchy with ions. My dad and brother looked down at me. What happened? I asked. “You were hit by lightning,” they said. Oh my God, I said. And then they helped me up, dusted me off, and, with all parties satisfied that I wasn’t a cinder, we went to the indoor courts to finish playing.
ADAM O. DAVIS
This is the punchline. Where people, horrified, laugh at the greater horror of our nonchalance. They expect drama; I give none. Just as I, thankfully, was given none. No theatrics. No heroics. Just lightning and tennis.
In the very beginning, there was a boom. A big one. And then from within the universe’s abyssal black, light. Life followed on Earth over the next several tens of billions of years. Lightning, like a dog, licked the planet ceaselessly. Thanks to it our early atmosphere of ammonia, hydrogen, methane, and water vapor yielded amino acids. In other words, lightning sowed terrestrial life. Everything that has come into existence has been lightningstruck.
No scratch. No mark. No burn. No singe. No Lichtenberg figure or nerve damage. No pain outside of the shock itself and no trouble moving or thinking. When I think back, I think of how unexceptional my strike was treated. No tears, fuss, fear. A thing that happened—big enough to earn me a nickname (“Sparky”) but not so big as to become anything other than a piece of personal trivia. I was hit by lightning, I can say. And so I do whenever the need strikes.
This sounds glib. Perhaps it is. The truth is I got lucky twice in two seconds. First, I was hit. Then, I was unhurt. It doesn’t always go like that.
Some lightning-strike survivors suffer debilitating neurological and cognitive injuries—their nervous systems inexplicably afire, their limbs useless or bound in pain, their thoughts scattered, fearful, angry. And, given the rarity of such accidents, the medical community is often at a loss when it comes to diagnosing and treating the symptoms of this seemingly invisible affliction. Frustrated with the lack of understanding and support he received in the wake of being struck by lightning while working as a bank teller in North Carolina, Steve Marshburn founded Lightning
Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International (LS&ESSI, Inc.), an organization that, in its own words, “extend[s] its arms to those who have encountered the harrowing experience of lightning strikes and electrical shocks. Our organization serves as a lifeline for survivors, offering guidance, camaraderie, and resources during their journey to recovery. We understand the unique challenges faced by our members, family and caregivers and are here to help.”
This is my favorite lighting strike story. Years ago, somewhere in Oklahoma, a man sat out a thunderstorm in a dollar theater. The building rattled and shook and the ceiling must have been in serious need of repair because a bolt of lightning busted through the roof and blew the man out of his seat. When he came to he bolted out the theater, through the parking lot to the Faraday cage of his car. Only he never made it. Halfway across the parking lot lighting found him a second time and sent his sneakers smoking from his feet. I believe he survived.
Another story. An engineer working in a transmission tower in the desert reaches up to grab something and, as he does, a bolt of lightning surges directly into his finger. For a moment he was something famous from Michelangelo—a cloud-borne Adam lazily touching his index to God’s, but no Eden followed for him. The bolt blazed down his outstretched arm and across his shoulders, buzzing from bone to socket to bone until blasting out his other arm in whose hand he held a wrench that was immediately vaporized. Poof. Blown to atoms. The engineer, other than heavily amped, was fine.
All of which is to say, lightning isn’t without a sense of humor. Take the fact that my electrician is the only other person I’ve met who’s been struck by lightning (Yosemite, hiking). When I asked him how often he gets shocked on the job he told me pretty regularly, but not as much as when he started. It’s just a little zap,
he said of the typical household load of 240 volts, which, if you consider that a lightning bolt can measure up to 300 million volts, seems tolerable. But if you ever meet an old commercial electrician, he continued, check out their elbows. Nothing but scars. Like the devil clawed right out of them. And maybe the devil did. Commercial electricians are licensed to work with up to 480 volts, meaning that when they get shocked it can be fatal unless the voltage finds a way to jump the body quick, which it can do if it barrels straight out the right angle the elbows present.
In Luke 10:18, Jesus states that he “beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” an expulsion that, theologically-speaking, occurred roughly around when the world was created. Note that Satan didn’t fall to hell (indeed, as any English major knows, Milton created a far more potent mythology for the devil than the Bible did) and Satan is never mentioned as inhabiting hell (it seems ol’ Scratch mostly hangs around Earth to tempt Christ and others). So Satan fell like lightning to our newborn planet and, not long after, life followed.
Humans are, basically, evolutionarily-wired electrical networks. As such, we’re particularly sensitive to heavy doses of voltage which explains why we can be both electrocuted to death and then electrocuted back to life, making electricity a decidedly Janus-like medicine.
The Leyden jar, a device that can store an electrical charge for later use (ahem, a fluxless capacitor) was invented for the first time twice in 1745 by Ewald Georg von Kleist and also Pieter van Musschenbroek. In later experimenting with one, Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “electrical battery.” He also, contrary to popular belief, did not discover electricity during his famous kite excursion—it had been a recognized phenomenon for a millennia—but he did invent the lightning rod, which nearly 240 years after its invention would serve as the accidental vehicle of
Jason Vorhees’ resurrection in the aptly titled, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. In a celebration of what Bukowski would call “the stupidity of our endurance,” Jason is exhumed by one of his near-victims in an attempt at closure which, naturally, goes unfulfilled as the near-victim plunges a length of iron fence post into the corpse’s chest only to see the fence post get struck by lightning, thereby reanimating Jason who in a decidedly Gage-like move carries the instrument of his deliverance with him until he’s reunited with his trusty machete halfway through the film.
The first defibrillators were an equally unwieldy prospect. One early method was to insert a hollow needle into the chest that an electrified wire could then be passed through to jolt the heart in need. A more successful, though even more invasive procedure, was to apply electrified paddles directly to the heart, necessitating some serious surgery. Additionally, because this method employed alternating current (AC), which required large generators, it could only be done in a hospital. It would be years before portable units, using direct current (DC), would be introduced and even longer before such defibrillators would save the United Kingdom’s iconic red telephone boxes from the scrapyard. Now many boxes’ telephones have been replaced with defibrillators which, due to fears of vandalism, can only be accessed after a person has dialed 999 (the UK’s 911) so that they can access the access code to unlock the defibrillator, meaning that the telephone box is still very much a telephone box but only if you’d like to dial one number.
Don’t we all want to start over again? In life. In love. To be redeemed in belief and deed by righting the past that made the future untenable? I think of how in R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies”
Michael Stipes sings, “. . . a chance, a second chance, a third chance,/a fourth chance, a word, a signal/a nod, a little breath/ just to fool myself, to catch myself/and make it real . . .” How we wait on signs to prove our bias, to buy deeper into the hope that what we had yesterday will be what we still have tomorrow.
ADAM O. DAVIS
Lightning wouldn’t leave Roy Sullivan alone, but it wasn’t until he suffered the fourth of the seven official strikes he’d receive over his lifetime that he began to believe the sky had it out for him. After that one, Sullivan, a Shenandoah National Park ranger (aka the Spark Ranger), took to carrying a can of water with him everywhere he went on account of the habit lightning had of setting his hair afire. Whether indoors (a ranger station, his truck) or outdoors (fishing, his front yard), Sullivan was a lightning rod for lightning and, owing to the force and frequency of his encounters—how else do you rationalize the elements having it in for you?—he grew paranoid. Weather became for him a mafia: clouds stalked him, thunder mocked him, electricity kept a constant crosshairs on his back. Eventually, lightning made a leper of him. He feared those in his company would be hit (as one of his wives was) and those in his company feared the same. Things got increasingly lonely for Roy. As former Shenandoah National Park Superintendent, Robert Jacobsen, explained to Inside NoVa, “A long standing rule in the park was that if you see a dark cloud heading your way—get away from Roy Sullivan.” What do you do when your only friend wants to kill you? What good is it to be singled out by the gods in an age that has no need for prophets? Sullivan died at seventy-one from suicide.
Every odd, no matter how fantastical the event, boils down to the possibility of less than one percent but everyone, regardless of interest, can find themselves named within that tiny kingdom of chance by events outside of their control. Some, like Roy Sullivan, might seem marked by fate to occupy that space more often than others, but as I like to remind my students, what are the odds that any of us would’ve been born into this world only to arrive in our classroom together? Odds are really nothing more than trivia— statistics that make life and its possibilities not only interesting but concrete. They assure us of a system that gives our lives
mathematical reason. In this, odds are like religion. But, as with everything, the odds only matter so much as we believe in them.
In his filmed 1954 NBC interview in which he explains his reasons for not traveling to Sweden to receive his Nobel Award in Literature (doctor’s orders), Ernest Hemingway’s halting automaton-like speech startles. He talks as if reading off a cue card (as he appears to be) and the interviewer is visibly flustered, stammering as he questions whether to ask another question of a man so clearly suffering the neurocognitive effects of not just two recent plane crashes (when trapped in the second plane, Hemingway escaped being burned to death by headbutting the jammed door open, fracturing his skull in the process) but the lifetime of concussions before them (the mortar blast in Italy, the falling skylight in Paris, the car windshield in London, the mortar blast and boulder in France, the fishing boat gaff in Cuba . . . Papa never met a circumstance his head didn’t answer for). What followed in the seven years of life he had left after this interview has been widely reported and, as a result, widely misreported (I think of an English professor I had who explained that Hemingway accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning his gun at a gun show, which was itself a misinterpretation of the New York Times article announcing his death in which his wife, Mary, claimed her husband “accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun” at home), but none have been given greater credence for contributing to his suicide than that of the electroconvulsive therapy he received at the Mayo Clinic in the months leading up to his suicide. Yet it wasn’t really the electricity’s fault. As the American Psychiatric Association reports, approximately 80 percent of patients with “uncomplicated, but severe major depression” experience substantial improvement through this treatment, so why didn’t those odds work for Hemingway? As it turns out, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which Dr. Andrew Farah,
author of Hemingway’s Brain, has argued convincingly Hemingway had, is exacerbated by ECT. In other words, Hemingway’s brain, already severely damaged by decades of cranial misadventure, was damaged further by the treatment that should have helped him. He, as death row inmates say, rode the lightning, all the way to the end.
In grade school I played a game called “Lights Out.” I only played it once. In a room in the school’s basement, there was a metal conduit that stretched from the light switch on the wall to the bank of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. A friend told me to hold the conduit, which I did, and he then flipped the switch. My body filled with burrs and everything went black. When I came to I was on my back, staring up at the lights which I felt I was now a part of. What powered them had flowed through me. An act of electrical conjugation. I buzzed. They buzzed. Together, we buzzed.
“Old Sparky” is the most popular nickname for the electric chair. The chair itself was invented by Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist (the joke here so obvious I refuse to name it). The first individual to ride its particular brand of lightning was William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his common-law wife with a hatchet, in 1890. By the time he finally sat in the hot seat his story had attracted powerful attention owing precisely to the particular brand of lighting he was set to ride: alternating current. At the time, AC was at war with DC because DC (and its biggest booster, Thomas Edison) had painted AC (and thereby its biggest booster, George Westinghouse) as deeply dangerous—a narrative whose promotion led to AC being employed as the means of execution. In a last-ditch attempt to correct this misrepresentation, Westinghouse hired a crackshot lawyer, W. Bourke Cockran (basically his era’s F. Lee Bailey), to support Kemmler’s appeal but the Supreme Court turned it down and Kemmler died a prolonged
and nauseating death in the chair. As Westinghouse later told reporters, “They would have done better using an axe.”
Who stands with the condemned at the end? The warden. The executioner. The prison chaplain. Witnesses may include the victim’s family, the condemned’s family and their lawyer, sometimes reporters, the sheriff of the county, and the district attorney of the county. And all there to stand in the presence of death. To confirm that the person sentenced to die has died. Yet as with Jason Vorhees, closure is a tricky thing. What can we end that memory can’t outlast? And how lucky was I that I was not alone on the day of my strike? How comforting it was to look up and see my dad and brother above me, standing between me and the sky.
In English, we fall head over heels. In French, we’re thunderstruck. And so I was in December 2003. My professor, a poet of Victorian aesthetics and long blonde hair, threw her usual end-of-semester party at her smoky apartment on the Upper West Side. Immediately upon entering the living room I was struck by a pair of eyes—bright as amber in the dim light. Call out whatever cliché you like but they all applied. I was frozen in place. Clocks slowed and all I could hear was the murmur of my heart thanks to a pair of eyes so electrifying I couldn’t even see the face they were in. Just a pair of hazel eyes holding my own in a crowded room. There was no question that we would spend all our time together that night, talking in the kitchen until going our separate ways. A year later, we found each other again and from that night on we were together in a togetherness that lasted until it didn’t. For nearly twenty years we did everything we could to be what the other person needed. We toiled in love—things were never easy with us, never quite comfortable, but we both believed love was work, which is true until love becomes nothing but work. We toiled until the toil overwhelmed us. We loved each other but we could never get it right, leaving us angry, exhausted, ashamed.
ADAM O. DAVIS
Despite all our chances, despite all our luck, despite our lightningbright daughters, what spark we had didn’t last. Love was a flicker of what it had been in that dark Manhattan apartment where we first met, some piece of stray voltage left whispering in the foil heart of our Leyden jar.
At the playground, my daughters play a game. They slide down the plastic slide so that the friction fills them with static electricity and then, charged and giggling, they chase me. In mock-horror, I run away, but never fast enough. Despite it all, despite everything, I want the shock.