Out of the Blue: A History of Lightning: Science, Superstition, and Amazing Stories of Survival
Out of the Blue: A History of Lightning: Science, Superstition, and Amazing Stories of Survival – Review
There is something pointed about lightning that appears to show purposefulness. We have earthquakes, we have tornadoes, we have many other worrisome planetary characteristics, but lightning appears aimed, it appears to pick off individuals in ways that cry out for a reason such a thing ought to befall them. The pointedness of lightning is one of the themes currently running through _Out of the Blue – A History of Lightning: Science, Superstition, and Amazing Stories of Survival_ (Delacorte Press) by John S. Friedman. It has a more-or-less historic run of chapters mostly dealing with how we have come to our modern awareness of lightning as a natural rather than supernatural phenomenon, intercalated with the account of a stunning release of climbers struck by lighting on a mountain of the Teton Range and with many individual stories about what lightning has done to survivors. Don’t call them victims. The Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Victims was founded in 1989, but officially changed those “Victims” to “Survivors”, and the organization succeeds with 1,500 members each of whom have insights no non-member will ever have. Friedman, a writer who usually made the Oscar-winning documentary _Hotel Terminus_ twenty years ago, has interviewed many of the survivors whose stories build up the most arresting element of the book. Lightning not just seems aimed, it is fast, conducting its devastation literally before those it hits hardly knew what hit them. The gods who use lightning in the stories are the ones quick to wrath. When Benjamin Franklin had newly invented the lightning rod, priests said against it, saying that they were impious tools to thwart God’s will. Though the folklore told now is highly amusing, the art of lightning is just as fully described, although there are still big holes in our fully understanding. Forked lightning is the most familiar; it happens on Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, too. On Earth, over a billion such flashes happen every year. An average flash is 25,000 feet long and one to six inches in diameter. It heats up the lightning channel to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, far hotter than the face of the sun. Plenty survive to tell about being hit by such bolts; such strikes are only fatal around ten per cents of the time. We think of lightning appearing down and hitting one target, but it can jump around. In Colorado in 2004, lightning hit the clubs of a golfer who was with a group, but then it immediately jumped from one person to another, resulting in injuries to the company of nineteen, no deaths. Tenacious golfers are at risk for lightning injury, leading to the safety slogan “Don’t be lame! End the game!” Boy Scouts too seem to be at risk, and the organization has eventually lost some massive lawsuits because it does not have a excellent safety record. The most strange stories here are of the people who get struck repeatedly; lightning not only does strike in the same place, it appears to prefer individual people. These “individual lightning rods” are not always forest rangers or otherwise in locales at risk for lightning strikes, they only get hit more often. There may be a therapeutic reason, something different in their body chemistry, but no one has a clue what it might be. As far as anyone knows, if you survive a lightning strike you are safe from future ones; no one who gets hit repeatedly has still died from successive strikes. Being struck by lightning has definite, but variable, physiological results. The general ideas that someone who is struck will burst into flames or will be directly reduced to ashes are wrong. There can be burns because of the intense heat, but there are often few outdoor notices of a strike. Even more serious and puzzling are neurological symptoms like memory or attention problems. There are few doctors who still make to see a lightning strike survivor, and so there are very few specialists. With the pointedness of lightning, it is not surprising that those who are struck and live take lessons from the experience. Over and over in interviews, they tell Friedman things like “God must have a plan for me”, and many have had their private faith greatly increased. No one mentions why such a plan had to include a lightning strike, and it seems that the best inspiration that such victims have gotten is to work devotedly for The Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors. The circularity doesn’t seem to register; if lightning strikes were a force for human good, we would not need such organizations, nor would we need National Lightning Safety Awareness Week each June, which is currently sponsored jointly by organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) , the Little League, and the PGA Golf Tour. Friedman’s book is an appealing combination of meteorological and medical science, combined with the individual stories of those whom lightning has hit, and the shocking stories of those who did not survive to tell the stories themselves.