For several hours, Wednesday evening: high winds and waggling trees. Grapevines outside my borrowed cottage got whacked. All the bluster yanked my socks off the laundry line and tossed them in the dirt.
As I wrote here last week, I’m currently attending an artist retreat in Eastern Europe. On Tuesday, our phones started to emit warnings that severe thunderstorms were anticipated. One of the artists got worried messages from his mother, from her home in Eastern Maryland, concerned he’d be okay.
Lightning is an electrical discharge, short-spanned, high voltage. Between two charged areas, it leaps: cloud to cloud, sometimes cloud to ground, sometimes in other directions. The energy release is nearly instantaneous, then the zones that zapped become neutralized, electrically.
Did you know? During a lightning flash, the temperature of the immediate area rockets up to about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit—multiple times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
I’ve occasionally done stupid things during lightning storms. I swam in the ocean several times, in a lake or a pool several times. I don’t regret it, but I wouldn’t do it again; I’m not nostalgic for times I’ve been an idiot. Still, I remember a funny draw, real desire, to be in water while lightning cracked the sky, when the jag appeared to dive through its own reflection.
You can be struck by lightning and survive.
Lightning can be smelled.
Wednesday evening, the mountains facing the village started to light up around nine. The hills were socked with clouds, so the clouds themselves would temporarily glow with brilliant flashes—as if a child was flicking a light switch on and off, or a photographer was doing a fashion shoot on the other side.
I think about lightning sometimes during good conversations. When people are drunk or moved, or just confused, when they step out of their poses and go raw. Opinions forking. Truth discharged. Not always nice, not always cute—fifty-thousand degrees isn’t comfortable for anybody. But at least the evening’s memorable.
Wednesday evening, the lightning show went on all night.
The last two weeks, when I’m not writing, I’m reading. Here’s a sentence I highlighted, that I don’t really understand, from Adam Phillips’s Missing Out—
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.
I’m not totally sure what that means, or why I’m including it here—it just feels right. The way I read it, when Phillips invokes violence, it’s about how tightly people can hold onto things. Grievances, troubled feelings, old ideas of ourselves or other people. With little idea of how forcefully we’re clutching.
Forest fires can generate their own lightning bolts.
Lightning occasionally shoots up from the ground.
Lightning isn’t violent, I remind myself while watching the show, because lightning doesn’t want.
“Ball lightning” is an amazing phenomenon that’s apparently not well understood. Spherical with fuzzy edges, it can pass through closed windows, it’s often observed to rotate. From Wikipedia, “Some have appeared within metal aircraft and have entered and left without causing damage.”
Here, the nights prior to the storm were clear skies. And because there’s little light around us—it’s basically an unpopulated area—the stars after sunset become almost instantly bright. Then, Wednesday night with all the clouds: deluge. Big rain, big noise. One of the brightest lightning flashes occurred at the same time as a deafening crack of thunder, suggesting it was directly above my roof.
Coffee cups rattled and almost fell off the kitchen shelf.
All morning Thursday: heavy downpour, rain in sheets. By lunchtime, though, things stopped abruptly, clouds parted and I stepped outside. My cottage is surrounded by tons of flora. All the trees and plants were sharply luminescent, light from the sun seemingly beaming through and refracted by every drop on every leaf.
The light itself became like lightning, but went nowhere.
When lightning strikes sandy soil, it can produce glass.
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Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ, a contributor at Travel + Leisure, and the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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I’m reminded of a line from Norman Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire” in which he writes something like “If a fire creates its own weather, you’re in for it”