Struck

Sitting with my back against the bathroom wall, I struggle to remember where I am. I press myself to my feet and stagger out onto the orange shag carpet. My girlfriend’s family stares at me. The storm hasn’t passed yet, and thunder rolls against the side of their old Indiana farmhouse, shaking the structure.

We came to the basement because of a tornado warning. My girlfriend’s younger brother lives down here: wood paneling, a stereo and record collection, the musky smell of teenage years. I went into the bathroom for a drink of water, and, as I turned the handle to the faucet, lightning struck. The current traveled through the metal piping and raced in a blue streak down the wall, then up my arm, connecting me to the heavens before knocking me to the floor.

How lucky am I? That I can stand and walk out and tell her family what happened? They marvel and keep asking if I feel all right. A dull headache and a bit queasy. That’s it. In a few hours, after the storm passes, all of us sleep.

I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.

Northern Indiana has seen its share of storms, including the Palm Sunday tornadoes that roared through Elkhart County in 1965, killing sixty people. I was just thirteen days old then, held in my mother’s arms as she knelt beneath the staircase in the basement of our small ranch house.

I grew up being told this story. My grandmother held my three-year-old sister under a blanket to protect against the possibility of flying glass. My father stood on the back porch, hands cupped around his eyes, mesmerized by the twin tornadoes that lowered from the sky two miles south of our home, destroying a Mennonite church near the railroad tracks. My mother says she called to him over and over, begging him to come inside.

When I wasn’t quite six, my grandfather died at the age of sixty-two. His was the first corpse I saw in a casket. Ashen, with ridiculous smudges of rouge to redden his cheeks, he didn’t look like himself.

After we lowered his casket into the void of the rectangular grave, I thought about death almost every day. I suppose this is what it means to be haunted. When I closed my eyes at night, I imagined I was in the casket with him, everything black, unable to sit up, the earth piled on top. I begged my mom to let me read the stack of comics I kept by my bed, to allow me to keep the light on a little longer. She was kind and always said yes, but “just ten minutes more.”

My grandmother came to live with us for a time. She cooked and cleaned, quilted and knitted. Each afternoon she broke down in tears.

During the day, I worried my parents would be killed by a truck crossing the line, or that their hearts would give out unexpectedly, eyes fluttering as they crashed to the floor at work. My mother assured me she wasn’t going to die anytime soon, and that those I loved would be in heaven when I got there. I’d heard in Sunday school that God had a plan. I wanted to ask why He made anyone die. How could He pick and choose? If you lived longer than someone else, was that your reward for being good and having faith?

Like my grandmother, I also broke down in tears. It was worst at school, my chest heaving, barely able to catch my breath as I told the teacher I needed to call my mom to make sure she was OK. Eventually our family physician prescribed what must have been a sedative, and my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Antrim, gave me a spoonful of “medicine” at lunch. My afternoons passed in a lazy dream.

What I wanted most was to stay home, and for my mother to stay with me. Our parents are the first gods we know, giving us life and caring for our every need. At church we read the story about splashing lamb’s blood above the door and how the spirit of God passed over those houses. I believed that, as long as we were in our house, death would pass us by.

Like many kids, I read Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, where I learned about Roy Sullivan, a ranger in Shenandoah National Park who claimed to have been struck by lightning seven times. In a picture in the book, he proudly displayed his ranger’s hat with a black hole burned in the top. I’d read comics about heroes who’d been transformed by lightning, some gaining the power to send scorching electricity from their open palms, and I imagined Sullivan possessed a secret superpower after being struck so many times.

In high school I was thrilled when the science teacher told us electricity runs through our bodies. I wasn’t surprised. It was clear from the heat I felt when a boy challenged me on the football field, or the shock that went through me when I slow-danced with a girl and her lips grazed my ear. Our lives are composed of small storms.

But what of the larger ones, the cataclysmic kind that devastate a landscape? Our ancient ancestors faced daily the threat of nature’s volatility, leaving them to wonder if some deity determined their fate—if nature itself had an animus that sought to punish them.

Because so much of life today is mediated—maybe the better word is controlled—through the world of screens, the threat of climate change and its rippling effects may seem distant. But if you’ve watched a tornado lift a house from its foundation, or seen the side of a hill engulfed in a firestorm, or witnessed the road before you vanish beneath flood waters, you’ll not soon forget: We live at the mercy of a world that holds and sustains us—and may just as easily extinguish our lives.

Each year in the US, more than forty people are killed by lightning. Different cultures perceive it as either blessing or curse, as revelation or condemnation. I suppose I simply see it as an existential threat and try my best not to ascribe providential meaning to it. I can’t bear to believe I’m somehow special, spared by some higher power for a purpose beyond my reckoning, passed over by death, only for it to take the life of another. Why should a six-year-old die from a brain tumor? Why should a woman who desperately wants to get home to her daughter on her birthday find herself plummeting from the sky as her plane crashes?

Yet I must confess: When I’m far from any shelter and lightning flashes across the sky, offering up an overexposed photograph of the landscape, I find myself praying for deliverance. The air expands and contracts, the snarl and rumble of the sound wave stirs an ancient fear in me, and the sky seems to say something I can’t quite make out. If only I could translate wind and rain, the concussive echoes of thunder, would I learn something about my place in the nature of things?

More than a decade after that blue streak ran through me, I had a new PhD in my pocket and a job at a school in the State University of New York system, only twenty-eight miles from the Canadian border. I’d been married seven years, but not to the girl whose parents owned the farmhouse. Shelly and I had welcomed our first son, Noah, into the world on my thirtieth birthday.

What I remember most about that job is a feeling of desperation: Five courses per semester with more than 150 students on the roster. A new dean who treated teaching like a nine-to-five, demanding we sign in and out when we arrived and left campus. Trapped in a cramped office, I thought constantly about Shelly and Noah. The best part of the day was holding my baby boy, reading a book to him on my lap or teaching him how to shoot on his miniature basketball hoop. He’d point to the television and say, “Dawwwwwg,” until we put 101 Dalmatians in the VCR, invisible wheels clacking behind the plastic flap, time measured in digital numbers, blinking like heat lightning on the horizon.

The college’s soccer coach, Larry, had also grown up in Indiana. He and his wife included us in holiday celebrations and babysat so we could go on the occasional date. He, too, was looking for a way out. We shared the anxious feeling that, if we stayed too many years in a place like this, we’d be trapped.

One Saturday, Larry and I had time for a leisurely run together. I checked the weather report—no chance of precipitation. We headed away from the town center, taking advantage of the rolling hills, the country roads, the warmth of the June sun.

On the way back, when we were a mile from my house, clouds began to cluster along the edge of Lake Ontario. In that part of the world, a storm can come up fast. We heard the thunder grumble, and as we stopped on a knoll at the town’s center, flashes of lightning bounded toward us, their strobing effect leaving my vision dotted.

Larry and I were running beneath a transformer when the bolt hit, showering current down and knocking us to the ground. The experience was surreal but all too familiar: Light streaking. Sparks falling like a waterfall from the transformer. A surge entering our bodies. What were the odds of being struck indirectly twice?

As I pushed myself from the pavement, my ears ringing from the power of the thunderclap, I saw confusion on Larry’s face. He managed to say, “What?” I pointed to the sky, the only answer. Then we ran as fast as we could toward the safety of home.