Do you remember long hot steamy sticky summer days and the oppressive feel of a warm and humid evening playing kickball as the streetlights came on? Sometimes, the parents would let us play until we were enveloped in darkness.
I remember that too.
The evening air would be as dense as molasses and the heat would wrap us in clammy sweat. A nice wrap up to the day was to soak in a hot tub with Mr. Bubble. We’d get out of the tub and the cool air felt so good along with the feel of clean pajamas and fresh bed linens.
I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic. I live in California and – honestly – I am missing the rumble of thunder and the cheap thrill of a summer storm. There was such great anticipation on a warm summer evening with the distant rumble of thunder as it intensified and grew closer.
Where I lived in Maryland was hilly and wooded. You could never see the storms approaching – but you could hear them. The sound was ominous – with concussive thunderclaps indicating cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and the anticipation associated with thunderstorms. It was the thrill of the approaching threat. It made you want to hunker down and curl up.
As a child, lightning was a huge mystery to me. It lasted but a nanosecond with a startling flash and it was gone – followed by the hypersonic demeanor of thunder. The lag between a lightning flash and the thunder always baffled me, especially at eight years old when we were out there in the street in a game of kickball and had to come inside. I was one a kid who wanted to be outside in a thunderstorm to actually see lightning instead of the flash and thunderclap from our living room.
My mother and grandmother grew up in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains where the lightning could be quite intense at times. My grandmother told horrifying stories of close lightning strikes and the dangers of lightning storms “up home” in Virginia’s hill country. Both were terrified of the lightning instead of enjoying the thrilling phenomenon of thunder and lightning.
As the storms approached, my mother would round us up and get us inside to sit on the foam rubber couch to “protect us from the lightning.” She didn’t understand lightning. She perceived the foam rubber sleeper sofa would protect us. However, that’s not how lightning works. It’s like that age old myth you are safer in a car due to the rubber tires.
The old rubber tire theory has never been true.
Motor vehicles are hit by lightning all the time. Vehicles are struck and the tires blow from the intense heat of lightning traveling from the rim around the rubber to the pavement. The vehicle’s electronics are typically fried from the intense power surge. Because you are seated in a steel cage, you tend to be safer from the lightning than you would be otherwise.
Another popular misconception is you are safe inside during an electrical storm. That has never been true either. Lightning – which is static electricity – will always find its path – including right through your home to ground or from ground. Unless you are in a steel frame building, there’s always some risk of being struck by lightning. They tell you to stay away from windows, which is a good idea because it reduces your chance of being the victim of a lightning strike. However, the power of a lightning strike knows few limits. It can pass through anything.
I say these things not to alarm you, but to dissolve those old myths shared with us as children and to take you back to a warm summer evening playing kickball or hide and go seek. Hide and go seek was evening better in the darkness of dusk – that is unless you had a weak moment and started laughing.
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