We’re All A Little Thunderstruck Over Here
or, They Say Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice But I Feel Like Once Is Probably Enough
There are times when it seems like the excitement never lets up around here.
Last Wednesday I got home from Fiber Revival 2017, caught a night’s sleep, got up, and started to dig out from under the correspondence backlog that invariably piles up while on the road — it’s never the quick answer items, it’s always the long answers and stuff that takes more time to handle. Having made a strong showing in that department, I took a break when the thunderstorm rolled in.

I’ve always liked to watch storms from the edge of shelter. Like standing on the front porch, or in Midwestern tradition, with the whole family sitting on lawn chairs in the garage with the door open. This time, I went to the front porch and stood just outside the front door, noting that it was coming down hard enough to swamp the rain gutter and overflow, which hasn’t happened in the several years since we redid the gutters to prevent that from happening with heavy rains. It was coming down fast. It was hot. And the front was moving past us the long way — as if it were headed east, hit the Ohio River valley, and started to slither northeasterly like a tangled string snagged on a low-hanging branch in a rapidly rising river.
(there’s your wacky metaphor or simile for the day, amirite?)
It was muggy. The kind of muggy where you know that even a hard rain isn’t going to cool things off, but rather, will make it even hotter when it’s done because now everything is steamy. Southwest Ohio in August is like an inverted sauna: you go outside to sweat, and then plunge back into your air-conditioned home or workspace or, really, any area that gets you out of the sauna. Last summer I learned high heat and humidity aggravates what we’ve come to call “the stripe” — the fourteen inches of scar tissue and dead nerve endings that serves as my trophy for surviving the removal of a twenty pound ovarian tumor. By the time I feel the prickling nerve pain start up in my torso, I already know it’s too late and soon it’ll be a bruisy feeling and deep fatigue. I’ve learned this the hard way a few times already, so I didn’t linger watching the storm in the heat.
My uncle had come over with his dog Bella, to stay while having some dental work done. They live in a beautifully pastoral Appalachian setting, whereas we live in pizza delivery range. At this particular moment, my husband Chad was in the shop barn with his colleague Brian, our kid and my uncle were off at the oral surgeon, and Bella was with me in the kitchen watching me cut up an Athena melon with thoughts of how delicious it was going to be once chilled.
That’s when suddenly things got real. I had the tip of my chef’s knife slicing the rind off a wedge of melon when a flash of light consumed my entire field of vision, there was a deafening bang, the whole house shook as if it had been rammed by a bus (nb: your storyteller has yet to be in a building while it is rammed by a bus. Perhaps she should stick to experiences she has had lest she invite still more excitement), and sparks shot out of a few ceiling light fixtures. Every hair on my body stood on end and my heart was instantly racing.
The power went out completely, followed by the barking of a Bella, the beeping of an uninterruptible power supply or two, and the sound of the air conditioning compressor on the other side of the kitchen wall spinning down. And then the lights came back up – well, some of them, at any rate. Through the downpour, I could see it looked like there was power on in the barn where Chad was, but things were definitely wonky in the house. Motivated by an extreme lack of desire to set foot outside in the storm, I finished slicing the rind off the melon wedge, exchanged chef’s knife for cell phone, and texted:
House struck by lightning. Kitchen breaker blown.
Chad dashed in (and I stifled a thought of “are you crazy? you could be struck by lightning!”) and we began to work through the house inspecting things. There was no power in the kitchen and every ground fault interrupt outlet was popped. I reset them, and the fridge, microwave, and dishwasher all lit up. Cool. I looked for signs of scorching at every outlet, every light switch, every fixture on the first floor; Chad took a flashlight to the mechanical closet where, of course, the breaker panel is located and the lights were out. I made a fast pass through the second floor, looking (and smelling) for signs of damage.
Nothing seemed to be on fire — you know, literally. I returned to the kitchen, and Chad came up from the basement. There wasn’t a cat to be seen anywhere. Turns out six cats can disappear in the time between the lightning and the thunder. Which in this case was, by my estimation, “an imperceptible difference, such that I don’t think there was one.”
Standing by the gas range, there was a hissing noise; I confirmed it wasn’t coming from the stove. It sounded more like it was coming from the vented range hood (which wouldn’t power on). “Maybe the lightning struck the compressor for the heat pump,” I said. “That seems unlikely,” said Chad, as he headed out in the rain to make sure there wasn’t an exploded, burning air conditioning compressor on the other side of the wall containing the liquid propane line for the stove and such exciting things. But sure enough, the hissing sound was coming from the compressor, or the pipe from the compressor into the house.
“At the very least,” said Chad, “We’ll need an electrician and HVAC service.” At least one circuit breaker wouldn’t stay on, lots of light bulbs were blown, and weird combinations of light switches and things didn’t work. I called the local HVAC repair company, and they promised to send someone right over to make sure things were safe.
“I don’t know if the house actually got struck by lightning,” said Chad’s colleague Brian, “but that was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.” Some abstract discussion ensued: how do you know when your house has been struck by lightning? I admit, I was irritable about that: I was really confident what had happened to the house in which I’d been standing when the event transpired. I mean, it was either that we were struck by lightning, or for a brief moment across some quantum reality space or another, we were living in a science fiction action movie where the enemy has just penetrated the shields and the bridge took a full hit from the energy beams. If we’d had klaxons, they’d have been going off; I had very clearly sent an experience damage controlman to inspect and report; I was fully like “and send an engineering team to assess whether we need to begin evacuation procedures,” and all.
Brian chuckled a little darkly. “And to think,” he said, “to think my daughter just asked if houses can get struck by lightning, and I told her it’s super rare and nothing she really needs to worry about.”
“Well,” I said, with all the brightness I could muster, “at least now you can tell her she has met someone who was in a house when it was struck by lightning, and she’s fine.”
I called the insurance company to start the claims process, and as the rain had slowed, walked around outside trying to inspect as much of the roof as I could. I didn’t see obvious damage, but it was hard to look everywhere, especially in the rain. The DSL router was obviously blown and there was no dial tone. I called the telco, who promised to ship a new router, but seemed vague on the idea that a fix might be more than “ship a new router.” Whatever; I’d been there before, working tech support and watching the front liners be like “Sweet! Ticket open, ship new router, ticket closed, I OWN this job!” so I rolled my eyes and figured I’d be calling back in the morning anyway. That’s how telcos work.
It began to sink in for me that this was probably not going to be over soon. My phone rang. It was the lady at the HVAC company, calling to let me know someone would be arriving in minutes. I told her I appreciated it; she said it must have been scary. I confirmed that; it had, indeed, been pretty scary. “It’s a good thing nobody was in the shower,” she commented, and my mouth went completely dry, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth as I said “I hadn’t even thought of that.” I pictured a man with some fancy platinum heart jewelry standing in 3 million volt rain, providing the fastest route to ground.
For a hot second I wondered if this would be the thing that gave me a beautiful streak of white hair like my mother always had. And then the HVAC guy was there. No doubt about it, he said, the hissing sound had been the air conditioning system dumping the entirety of its refrigerant, via a leak in the plumbing right at the wall of the house. There would be no quick fix to that. They’d be back in the morning to inspect the whole thing, but for now? We were safe, although — to stick with that science fiction action movie framing — the environmentals were down for the count. I decided the science fictional imagery worked for me. Among other things, it meant I could say to myself: but since this is actually a house on the ground, the loss of environmentals does not mean certain death in and of itself. Yet.
We opted for pizza for dinner, instead of the menu I’d planned. It would have been tonkatsu; potatoes; apple-arugula-red-onion salad in a lemon vinaigrette; butternut squash soup with ginger; fresh melon; nectarines with creme fraiche and a balsamic drizzle. But I couldn’t stand the heat, so I got out of the kitchen.
At bedtime, I reached for my electric toothbrush and looked in the mirror. The toothbrush wouldn’t come on. And I suddenly saw what I’d previously missed: the outlets in the bathroom mirror were blasted and burnt.

The next day, with clear skies, we did more walkarounds. Chad found a blasted shingle in the front yard near the driveway.

We couldn’t tell where it came from. I did more walking around, squinting hard in the sunlight, chuckling inwardly about staring at the sun and pending eclipse action. And then, through some branches, I saw it.

This part of the roof could be scrambled to from the porch roof, which we have a ladder long enough to reach, so Chad went up.

“It looks like someone blasted shingles off and slammed the roof with a sledgehammer,” he reported. He took pictures, and came back down. “I’ve gotta send this to Brian,” he said as he showed me.
“I’m not sure that looks like lightning struck it,” said Brian. “I mean, shouldn’t it have set something on fire?” I can admit to giving that comment some side-eye. I mean, what’s the alternative explanation? Chad sardonically suggested a dude on the roof with a sledgehammer. My uncle suggested: perhaps it’s a very, very miniaturized missile test that took place undercover of a thunderstorm. I may have stated that I wasn’t saying it was aliens, but… and whipped out my phone to look for photos of what a roof struck by lightning looks like.
And, it’s true: lots of pictures looked like a house that had burnt to the ground. But there were some that looked for all the world like someone had just photoshopped the shingles a different color.
Maybe it was this guy. Maybe there were frost giants about.

Since then, it’s pretty much been a whirlwind of contractors and estimates and phone calls and blasting through the cellular data at an alarming rate trying to get work done. And a friendly wager as to whether or not contractors will agree the roof damage is consistent with a lightning strike (that seems, so far, to be a no-brainer, by the way).
We managed to take a little time out to grab our welding helmets and stare at the sky in the early afternoon yesterday. It’s hard not to want to ascribe all kinds of portentous sentiment to a span of days that range from being struck by lightning to watching an eclipse. Through a welding helmet, it was a remarkable sight — at times, you could see that the moon was not a disc, but rather a globe, based on the shadow effect. We had a 90ish percent totality here, and it was pretty amazing. We poured some good whisky for Pachamama since the word has always been that she’s hungry in August, and it seemed right to make sure she got a drink during an eclipse in August when we’ve just been struck by lightning.
I thought about how humans have contemplated eclipses for aeons. I pictured people sitting around saying “I think it’s something going between us and the sun,” and other people scoffing, “As if! What would it be, the moon? Haha, very funny!” I thought about the science of many ancient people in knowing when these things would happen, the generations of people taking notes and telling their stories. I looked up at an occluded sun through a welding helmet, and pondered trying to snap a picture through the helmet — and discarded the idea. Among other things, I knew that at that very moment, my cousin Ross was flying a U2 on a mission he’d planned for over a year, with all his favorite camera gear and lots of practice, unfathomably high above us, there to directly observe and document our cosmic insignificance, like a modern Icarus who doesn’t fuck up.
And yet… here we are, in all our insignificance, limping along with major repairs needed, calling in engineering teams to supplement our own little crew here in this amazing science story that’s anything but fiction. The earth spins on its axis, orbiting the sun, with a third celestial body getting in the mix, and by these things we mark the passage of time itself.
As to lightning, it remains more of a mystery in some respects than an eclipse. How do clouds of water vapor become electrically charged? Scientists still don’t entirely agree, and you’ll often find that good answers to the question “OMG how does lighting even work?” will provide multiple working theories. I thought I’d paid attention in science class, and done some extra reading besides, but there are still a million things I didn’t imagine about a lightning strike. Like that they’re less than an inch in diameter most of the time. Or that thunder feels like a blast, right up close. I mean maybe these things are obvious.
What are the odds of being struck by lightning? Actually, it turns out they’re better than I’d have expected: “the odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000,” says National Geographic. So not even one in a million.
By contrast, the odds of winning the Powerball lottery are around 1 in 292 million. And yet, more people gamble that they’ll win the lottery than be involved in a lightning strike.
All things considered, so far, it looks like we’ve been lucky. We didn’t have a fire. We didn’t lose much in the way of electronics or appliances. We had to buy a window air conditioner so those of us – me and Chad – who should avoid extreme heat for health reasons can in fact get out of the heat. But we could. And we’ve got homeowner’s insurance. It’ll take time, but whether it was Thor or a star destroyer with tight beam energy weapons, they didn’t take us out. We’re still in this. However small we are, however insignificant, we persevere. It’s what humans do.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you can share it or click the hearts and clapping hands.
