LIGHTNING PROTECTION
I’ve had two experiences with lightning and they were as close as I ever
want to get to one of Nature’s furies. The first happened on a hot,
humid Ohio summer afternoon. I was in the house and looked out a window
to see the brilliant blue sky of a few minutes ago being rapidly replaced
by clouds that were a sickening grayish-greenish mass of something-horrible-about-to-happen. All
eight of my horses were out in our back pasture, grazing peacefully, completely
oblivious to the approaching storm.
As the clouds advanced, I ran to the pasture gate and bellowed our standard “calling the group in” cry of “Blackie, Dinner.” This usually brought an instant response since the herd leader, Dakoto Blackie, thought every meal was a gift from the gods. If Blackie headed for the barn, so did everyone else. But, of course, that didn’t happen this time when there was an actual emergency about to occur. I could see Blackie, head down, munching away. The back pasture was a quarter-mile down a lane and I headed that way, still calling out, “Blackie, Dinner” and getting no response. My herd looked like a diorama of Breyer horses against the most ominious sky I ever saw in my life. Lightning began to flash. I reached the back pasture gate and yelled again. This time Blackie heard me, snorted in pure joy at the word, “dinner,” and took off for the barn, leaving me to huff and puff my way back up the lane to the barn (I hadn’t quit smoking at the time—a horse with terminal pneumonia would have been in better shape than I was).
My horses were trained to leave and enter the barn via a runway, so when I staggered back to the barn/pasture gate, it took only a couple of minutes to get everyone inside. No sooner had Amigo (low man on the totem pole) got his butt inside the barn door, then lightning struck our water trough, not six feet from where the horses had congregated while waiting for me. The ground shook, my skin tingled, and when the thunder caught up to the flash, I thought I’d blown my eardrums. Now, when a dark sky gets that greenish tinge, I shudder to think what might have happened if I’d been even a minute slower.
The second instance was one of those “messages from on high.” It occurred just after the rain had ceased following a summer thunderstorm. This time the horses were inside and I was cleaning stalls. As soon as the last raindrop fell I pushed my heaped-high, steel-tray contractors wheelbarrow out to the manure pile. I was almost there when a lightning bolt hit close enough to yank the wheelbarrow out of my hands, toss it about ten feet off the ground where it flipped and spilled all its contents right on top of me. I barely escaped being hit by the wheelbarrow itself. After I got done trembling, I realized how lucky I was to only need a shower, not an emergency room. The message: just because the rain has stopped doesn’t mean the storm activity has also ended. Wait about 30 minutes to make sure a storm is truly over.
I want to take a short break here so you can read David H. Levy’s article, “When the Big Clouds Gather” that first appeared in the May 18, 2003 issue of PARADE Magazine. This article provides an excellent overview of what lightning is all about and what you can do to protect yourself. As you read his article, picture your animals in pasture. Would you be able to get them quickly to shelter?
