300,000,000 Million Volts

Part One

By Carter C. Crabtree

“On the thirty-first floor a gold plated door won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.” – The Flying Burrito Brothers

Let’s talk about good old-fashioned lightning. The kind that jumps right out of the sky when you’re not looking.

And did you know? Lightning can also jump from the ground to the sky? It can, and it’s the it’s the most dangerous kind of lightning. In short, the stuff is highly unpredictable, especially when it comes to a hot spot right near you.

This phenomenon is often taken for granted. As in: “Hell of a storm!” said many. “My TV got toasted!” added others. And, “It was like I was struck by lightning!” Former teenybopper Lou Christie sang about lightning hitting him along time ago in top 40 tune involving young people and over-active hormones.

Chances are very high you’ve been caught in a bad thunderstorm here or there. If you live in Florida, it’s pretty much 100% guaranteed, every year.

It’s been said many times that Florida is the lightning capitol of the world. That’s not quite true. While Florida gets the nod as the lightning capitol of The United States, Venezuela is the worldwide leader.

The chances of lightning appearing somewhere near you are also pretty high. Personally, I call it the ‘Crack-Boom Factor’.

It goes something like this: If you’ve ever been really close to a lightning strike, several things can happen, First, you’ll hear the actual crack of the lightning bolt. At the same time, the atmosphere is suddenly overheated heated by the lightning bolt(s), followed by a most-definite, very loud boom, that rolls away.. It’s the time interval between the crack and the boom that tells the story. It’s a crude measurement of how close that son-of-a-bitch hit the Earth. As in, near your ass.

This has happened to me on more than a few occasions. They were all quite remarkable. You may be interested in a few.

As a Florida Boy, I lost count of my personal crack-booms many decades ago.

The closest happened to me in a parking lot as I was about the get out of my car one fine morning. More on that in a moment .

Here’s a news flash: If there’s a lightning flash and you don’t hear a boom rolling away. Then you’ve likely been killed (as in dead) immediately or, if you’re lucky, badly injured or shaken like there was no tomorrow.

You just got struck by lightning. Period. You don’t get to say, “Hold my beer.”

This may sound a bit funny. But it’s not.

A man who was my mother’s boss in the 1960’s was struck and killed by lightning while standing under a tree, on a golf course, during a storm. He wasn’t the only one standing there. It messed with the other golfers big time, but they didn’t die. They were just really messed up.

My mom cried for a week. It left me deeply affected. Then my own stories unfolded. I’ll offer a basic one here today. As it turns out, I experienced many strange moments involving lightning.

I mentioned about a close hit. It happened as I was exiting my 1970 Pontiac Firebird. This was in a parking lot at the University of South Florida around 1975.

I had put my hand on the interior door lever when lightning struck the pavement about two feet away from the driver’s side door. As in, my driver’s side, with me just inside the car.

For a split second, everything went white. Then, gone. Pieces of asphalt from the parking lot rained down on my car and those around me. I heard thunder rolling away from me. The crashing asphalt chunks sounded like popcorn. Seems I almost got popped myself.

I sat there, fairly stunned, I’d say. Then I opened the door, slowly. It wasn’t a dream or some leftover party dream from the night before.

I stood up and looked around at the parking lot next to to The College of Arts & Letters. “Wow,” I recall thinking. Or something more profane.

On the hood, top, and trunk of my bronze Firebird, I noticed that chunks of parking lot asphalt, of all sizes, were all over the fucking place.

I looked down and saw a freshly-blasted hole in the pavement right next to my car door. I’d call it about 6 inches around and several inches deep. I stared at it. It gave me what is sometimes known as ‘pause’.

I looked around. In a circle of about 50 feet, other attendees at the Arts and Letters building got their own taste of this lightning strike, I’d say. The owners just weren’t there to see it in person.

I went to class and didn’t say anything to anyone. But, I sure felt strange.

After class, I did an arm-swipe to get the larger chunks of parking lot off the Pontiac’s hood, and left. As I pulled away, I recall my empty parking spot with all these others cars coated in asphalt.

I sometimes have wondered, if the other car owners around me wondered, what happened to the person parked in that nasty spot?

More later, C.C.C.