POW!

   John Scalzi was almost hit by lightning a few weeks ago. Apparently, it made a sound like Batman punching a bad guy. His experience reminded me of a similar one I had several years ago.
   The area I live in is somewhat a thunderstorm alley. During July and August every year we will have several spectacular lightning displays that my parents, only a twenty minute drive south, will see nothing of. I used to work for an electronics store, where one of my responsibilities was dealing with the insurance companies on claims for lost or damaged electronics. During July and August every year, my file for lightning damaged TVs and VCRs would be several inches thick.
   The story I am about to recount happened almost ten years ago. I remember that my son was a baby at the time. It was mid summer, and my wife and I were in the midst of decorating the living room. We were painting.
   The paint was giving us problems. We could not get any reasonable amount of coverage out of it, and it was clumping, and getting stringy. I ended up taking a gallon back to the store, where they replaced it for me. It is somewhat of a mark against the store in question that they did not tell me what I later found out from someone else: you cannot use latex paint in extreme heat and humidity.
   That is high summer in southern Ontario, ninety degrees, and about ninety-eight per cent humidity. Like trying to breathe in cream soup. This particular day just kept getting increasingly humid as the afternoon wore on. Any good paint store would have just told me, "put the paint away. You can't use it in this weather." Instead, they replaced the gallon, and I set off home.
   Now, the store was only about a three minute drive from my house. When I got into the car, it was sunny out. By the time I pulled into my driveway, the rain had started to fall. Drops the size of shotglasses hit the windshield with the explosiveness of stones dropped into still water from a mile high. I ran into the house just in time to avoid being drenched by a deluge that came down like a tidal wave.
   We could hear the thunder grumbling disconcertingly from miles behind the house. Every few seconds, the windows of the school across the street flickered with approaching lightning. The paint was not co-operating. The new gallon was no different than the old. I think it was at this point that we decided the weather might have something to do with that, so we gave up on the painting.
   Though it was still only early afternoon, it was dark enough outside for the streetlights to come on. My wife and I finished putting away the paint, and sat in the living room listening to the approaching storm. We started counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, like we used to as kids, gauging how far away the storm was from us.
   It went something like this:
   Flash, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand, Boom!
   Flash, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, BOOM!
   Flash, one one-thousand, two-BOOM!
   Flash, One-BOOM!
   The very next instant, there was the brightest flash of light I have ever seen, and the loudest boom I have ever heard, and there was no space of time in between them. The center of the storm had arrived.
   I looked out the front window. The street was a raging river. I ran to the side door of the house and looked out and into the backyard, but I could not see anything. The backyard was full of smoke.
   My wife was more concerned about the smoke inside the house. She had been heading to the back of the house to check on Matthew, who was sleeping in his crib at the time, when there was an explosion in our bedroom. There was no actual fire, and the smoke cleared quickly. When she had checked on Matthew (he slept soundly through the whole thing) she tentatively stuck her head into our bedroom. The light fixture in the ceiling was gone. Just gone, with no indication of where it had gone until she noticed the thousands of minuscule shards of glass embedded in the bedspread.
   Not taking any chances, we immediately called the fire department, who responded within seconds, it seemed. Five big guys in big boots tramped their way through the house, up into the attic, and back down, and declared the place fire free, and safe to stay in. The next call was to an electrician.
   Luckily, I knew someone. He was a regular customer of mine at the electronics store I worked in, and he came right over. He examined the wiring in the attic, and the electrical panel, and declared everything in order, flipped the main breaker, and we had light again. Except in the bedroom.
   The bedroom was a mess. After vacuuming up the glass shards on the floor, we ventured in for a closer look, and discovered some amazing things. In addition to there no longer being a light fixture on the ceiling, there was no longer a light switch on the wall. It, too, seemed to be just gone. My wife eventually found it on the floor across the room. It had blown out of its electrical box, and flown through the air with enough force to leave a dent in the wall across from it, twelve feet away. Another discovery was the nail heads sticking out through the drywall. The lightning had hit the house with enough force to drive the nails almost a half inch out of the framing studs in the exterior wall.
   An expedition to the back yard resulted in the discovery of another missing item. We had a clothesline strung between the house, and a big tree in the back yard. You know the type, with two reels, and a line running in a continuous loop so you can run the clothes out and later pull them back. Yeah. It was gone too.
   Later examination of the lawn would reveal its whereabouts. We are talking about a 3/8 inch twisted steel cable, sheathed in plastic, or some kind of poly material. What I found were several hundred half inch long sections of cable scattered in the grass. The steel was burned to a crisp. There was no sign of any sheathing. I also found that one of the lag bolts fastening the reel to the wall was completely black.
   This is what appeared to have happened. The lightning hit the tree. Normally, it would just go to ground there, and there would be no problem. Except it found the metal eyelet I had screwed into the tree to hold the clothesline. Metal has significantly less resistance to electrical current than green wood, so it followed the clothesline, hit the house with enough force to move nails out of the two-by-fours, and then went back across the clothesline to the tree. At some point, the superheated clothesline gave way, and the charge arced across empty space. My neighbour told me it looked like the sun was in the middle of my backyard. It then went to ground via the tree. To this day, you can see the black spot at the base of the tree where it finally found earth.
  To give you some idea of the voltage involved, consider this. The lightning never got inside the house. Just the residual static charge in the air around the bolt leaped from the wall outside to the wiring inside the attic, causing the fixture and switch in the bedroom to violently expire. Luckily, the main breaker tripped at that time, because next in line was my son's room, where he continued to sleep through even the fire department's visit.
   Luckily, no one was hurt, and there was no serious damage to the house. Unluckily, I had to add my own list of electronic equipment to that several inch thick file. But that is another story.