Electrical Storm

“Lightning never strikes the same place twice.” 

It’s demonstrably untrue.  The statement fails to pass the most cursory of smell tests.  Which isn’t to say that a place does not retain some ghost of a memory of what came before, of a massacre, military invasion, of a miracle or a man with stars in his eyes.  Places, I’ll admit it, they know, but there’s only so many ways a physical locality can protect itself from something that happened ever happening again.

The Empire State Building is struck by lightning an average of 23 times every year.

The fat mousy lady with the strawberry hair who lives down the road from my lake house, she got herself struck by lightning way back in the Nineties.  Walking out to the shed she was, with the sky overcast black and the birds flying reckless and low.  One moment strolling along, whistling the Smashing Pumpkins or some such tune, then a something happened.  She woke up lying in the mud, blown clean out of her shoes and without an inkling of how she’d gotten there.

The fat mousy lady with the strawberry hair says when she woke up her feet were smoking.

Her feet!

You see, one of the downsides of being struck by lightning, as it turns out, is that the myelin sheath that wraps up each one of your nerve cells?  Well, it melts.  Get struck by lightning and your nerves won’t send along those little electrical charges of information to the next nerve cell the way they used to. 

Get struck by lightning and you won’t learn new information the way you do now.

My lake house sits on the edge of the East Texas Great Piney Woods, meaning it’s filled to the brim with those skinny toothpick Texas pines, all grey bark and green needles and brushing against the sky all day long. 

A couple times a year minimum I travel up to the land to discover that one of the (“my”?) trees has been sliced with electricity.    Two parallel, ragged red lines twisting around and around the trunk together.  That tree, once hit, it will slowly die, though the process might take years.

My neighbor, the fat mousy lady with the strawberry hair, I spoke with her just a couple weeks back. She’d traveled down to Houston for something and admitted to feeling a bit traumatized by the trip.  “The people!” she cried.  “The people all looked at me as though I was sitting on the back of a Harley again!”

She stared off at nothing in particular, thinking (assuming her nerve cells are in fact still capable of such an activity).  “I don’t remember ever being on the back of a Harley, but that’s what they tell me.”

I remember the tingle.  Walking across campus many years ago, the little hairs on my arms suddenly tingling, standing on end.  Without thought, without even knowing why, really, I hit the ground, squatted down in a ball as though I were preparing for a 1950’s schoolhouse nuclear attack. 

Everyone around me, seeing me get down, they all proceeded to do the same.  Looking back, I’m sure they did not know why, either. It just felt like the thing to do.

The lightning struck a tree maybe forty feet away.  Looking at it later on, after days or weeks or maybe months had passed, I didn’t see the telltale jagged parallel twists.  The tree was just burned up.

But it wasn’t until later that I would find out about the jagged parallel twists.  Not until the lake house and the land and the Great Piney Woods.

Later on, after days or weeks or maybe months had passed, I’d want to feel the tingle again.  I’d want time to stop again.

In the Great Piney Woods of East Texas, the world smells like pine needles all the time, and it doesn’t matter if anyone is burning and it doesn’t matter what time of year, that sharp feeling that’s sharper than the mere sense of smell is going to hit your brain every moment of every day until you pack your shit up and drive your city slicker ass back down the road to Houston.

And now it’s raining and storming and the whole kit and caboodle sounds like it’s precisely overhead, smack dab over the rooftop, and you can’t even count “one” after the flash before the thunder and boom comes.

And I walk outside still in my good clothes, out to the tree-line, and I close my eyes, spread my arms, and I tilt back my head.

And I wait for the familiar charge of electric tingle.