THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 28, 1996 TAG: 9606270157
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: OVER EASY
SOURCE: JO-ANN CLEGG
LENGTH: 77 lines
Having regular doses of thunderbolts and lightning claps in my direction is beginning to get on my nerves.
Literally.
And eat away at the contents of my pocketbook.
Much too literally.
For at least the eighth time in my life I have been sitting quietly, minding my own business when a bolt from the black (skies that spawn lightning are never, ever blue) has taken a detour on its route from the heavens to the bowels of the earth to give me a wake-up call.
The latest one, in Monday night's storm, hit the telephone wire and fried the innards of my computer modem.
As the strikes of my life have gone, this one was more annoying and expensive than frightening.
Not so my first experience with one. That was when I was 13 and away at summer camp.
My cabin mates and I got caught out in the woods picking berries (and, just incidentally, trying to find the path to the adjoining boys camp) when a storm came up.
We beat feet back to the camp's last outpost, the nurse's cabin. I grabbed a rocker on one side of the enclosed porch. Lil grabbed a metal folding chair on the other, on the interior wall, next to an electrical outlet which was connected to a visible length of electrical cable.
Moments later I watched wide-eyed as a ball of blue light traveled down the cable, through the outlet and out into the room where it disappeared with a poof.
When last seen it was about two feet away from where I was sitting. Its path had taken it not two inches from the side of Lil's metal chair.
The experience was terrifying. It was also good training for what was to come.
Several years later I was home alone one afternoon, sitting in the breakfast nook, drinking iced tea and listening to the radio when I saw a flash and looked up to see a familiar sight.
The color was blue, the shape was round and the route was along the electric wires leading to the overhead light.
``Anything interesting happen today?'' my father asked that evening.
``Yeah,'' I told him. ``A lightning bolt came in and blew out the overhead light in the breakfast nook.''
``Right,'' my father replied, ``and President Truman announced that a man has landed on the moon and it really is made of green cheese.''
``OK, but I think you better change the bulb. It's burned out,'' I said.
Melted to the ceramic fixture would have been a better description of what had happened to that bulb.
It took an electrician, a new fixture and major wiring changes to get it working again.
By that time I was resigned to the fact that I was going to go through life observing lightning strikes and trying, often with little success, to convince others of what I had witnessed.
Some were easier to document than others.
No one believed me when I said a bolt had traveled down a guy wire on the telephone pole next to my car in a grocery store parking lot. Nor did they believe me when I described seeing one strike the mast of a sailboat at a nearby dock.
On the other hand, there was little need to explain after I saw a long chain take out a birch tree in our back yard. The accompanying thunder clap rattled two thirds of the windows in our ZIP code.
The same was true of the one which struck our television cable and blew out the VCR. By the time Bill and I got to the family room the little elevator that held the top loaded tape was going up and down at an unbelievable rate, all the lights on the front of the unit were blinking in relay and smoke was pouring out of the controls.
That was an expensive one. So was the one that took out our Bradford pear a couple of months ago. It cost us $5.99 to plant the young tree 10 years ago. It cost a couple of hundred to get the remains of the mature tree out of the lawn.
With this latest strike I guess I just do what I usually do - write a check and be grateful that the damage wasn't worse.
I just wish that Thor and his cohorts in the lightning bolt business would find someone else to pick on. by CNB