Notes on the International Lightning Strike Survivor Conference
What is it like to be touched by a lightning bolt?
AUGUST 22, 2023
There are three types of lightning: cloud to cloud, or intercloud, which leaps across gaps of clear air; intracloud, which doesn’t leave the cloud at all; and cloud to ground, the most threatening: a stream, or rather a meeting of two streams, of ionised particles, each following its own determined course, one towards the heavens, the other towards earth, and where they meet the air crackles with heat, creating a sky of forking paths.
To the attendees of the International Lightning Strike Survivor Conference, who have all had encounters with the third kind, the oft-mentioned statistic (nine out of ten survive) offers little consolation. Many of them, given the consequences, would prefer to have been struck dead. Survival provides small solace when your entire existence has been electrically altered.
Just as lightning isn’t a single event but rather a sequence of strokes, so the memory of a lightning strike returns in fierce, dramatic bolts rather than as one clear picture. Among the attendees of this lightning strike survivor conference, held in the Hudson Valley, in the state of New York, the weekend of 17–19 April 2009, a few individuals are especially eager to share their story:
EINAR GERHARDSEN, a tall musician of thirty-six, had been sitting on a hill in the outskirts of Oslo watching a motor race. The cars buzzed past like angered wasps, the red leading the way. After the red came a green and then a blue, flashes of color streaking the tarmac. And then an altogether different kind of flash, this one more luminous, less metallic. At first Einar thought a bomb had gone off. Nearly one hundred spectators were thrown from their seats and scattered across the hill. People shrieked, the cars continued to zip by, engines louder than human cries. Minutes later sixteen ambulances, nearly as fast as the race cars, appeared. Half the spectators, Einar included, were loaded onto stretchers and taken away.
Einar advances in small steps and has an uncomfortable relationship with the ground. He prefers stairs and inclines and, like a tightrope walker, feels lost when confronted with too much flat surface. Prone to panic attacks and overwhelming bouts of confusion, he never goes anywhere without his mother. There are no physical traces of the strike, yet his mind is a maze of short circuits.
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Distinguished ornithologist ALEX COSTA from Tampa, Florida, the lightning state (three times more strikes than any other in the US), was observing a rare migratory bird when struck, and when he returned to his senses the bird had vanished along with his shoes, binoculars and longterm memory.
Indoor landscape painting (he rarely leaves home) has replaced ornithology and, with his good hand, he now paints imaginary woods and meadows. He doesn’t sleep much at night but reads and takes long naps in his armchair by the window.
MARJORIE WINTERS, a dark-haired woman of fifty-six, survived the strike but her terrier didn’t. At around midnight Arthur was let out for a final run, and she was on the porch having a last cigarette, when all of a sudden something crackled and popped and Arthur let out half a squeal. When Marjorie stepped off the porch to investigate, a second strike flung her across the garden.
Now she’s a collection of nervous twitches and tics, her body and brain inclining heavily towards the left, and she’s had to have her pacemaker replaced twice. She has also lost the ability to feel the cold and needs a thermometer to dress. Arthur, meanwhile, lives in a cabinet with glass doors, his legs bowed under, jaws petrified in mid-yelp. After two thousand nights sleeping at the foot of her bed, he’s now curled up like the dog of Pompeii.
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Twenty-nine-year-old CHARLES WINLAKE is a walking lightning rod. Already struck four times in his brief life, he fears the sky has yet to leave him alone. His first experience was in his early twenties, as he drove along with his elbow propped out an open window. The second time, two years later, it happened while opening the tap of the kitchen sink: a massive bolt outside, an electrical current traveling up his arm. The third time, he was meditating beneath a tree (by then, he’d turned to Buddhism). And the fourth, just under a year ago, occurred when returning from an amusement park. All four times, his heart stopped beating for nearly a minute.
He’s added rubber soles to every shoe and replaced his metal-rimmed glasses with plastic frames but each time he leaves home he glances upwards with trepidation. His dream to become a landscape gardener is long over and he can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. His speech is slurred, his hair gone grey, headaches blinding. Apart from two pet salamanders, his prized possession is a fulgurite, the hard, mineral imprint of lightning’s path underground (a glass tube of petrified lightning), which his cousin once found up on Mount Thielsen.
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MICHAEL and PETRA UBERMEYER had been sitting in folding chairs listening to a summer concert played by students from the local conservatory – “ein ästhetisches Tortur,” according to Michael – when lightning struck from above and wiped out the cellist and lead violinist. It also hit the audience in the first few rows. Michael later accepted all physical and psychological consequences as penance for having criticized the young musicians during the last seconds of their lives. His wife, however, who had avidly supported the quartet, saw no reason to be philosophical. Both received permanent cobwebbed wounds on their sides and Michael, a musicologist, was left deaf. He spends his days reading musical scores or else walking up and down his street with a weary step.
This piece is an excerpt from Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & A Portrait Gallery, which will be published by Catapult on August 29, 2023.