The mystery about lightning

Whether for lack of common sense or for sheer excitement, I decided to venture off on my Sunday walk through the hiking trails of Memorial Park as a thunderstorm started to loom over me with thick, roiling black clouds. As I entered the trail head, a loud peal of thunder cracked above me. Two more bangs quickly followed, and then the sky opened up. As the rain began to move through the trees, the din became louder and louder. I opened my umbrella and stood underneath a clump of cross vines straddled between two pines.

This summer in Houston has been HOT. Second hottest summer since 1932 according to Channel 11 news. I don’t know about that, but it certainly has been the hottest since I moved here from Maine in 2006. And as I found out by eating breakfast at the House of Pies on Friday a few weeks back, Texans are as good at telling jokes about the heat as New Englanders are at telling jokes about the cold: “Been so hot here lately that the farmers are having to feed their chickens chipped ice to keep them from laying hard boiled eggs.”

Not that I haven’t experienced hot weather before. Spent a couple of summers in Wichita, KS where 100 plus degree temperatures were not uncommon for August. But it was a dry heat. Houston, though, the humidity makes taking the heat a real challenge. A 100 degree day with 70% humidity can make it feel like 112. As Leon Hale put it in his column in today’s Houston Chronicle, you have to be a “heat lover” to enjoy being out in that kind of weather.

As I stood there with the rain misting around me, a couple more loud crackles of thunder went off. Then the rain really started to come down. A bright flash sizzled through the trees followed by a loud boom. That was close, I said to myself. Really close. I started having second thoughts about venturing out on my walk today. It’s one thing to enjoy a storm sitting next to a window inside the comfort and safety of your home, and an entirely different thing to be outside in it. The mystery about lightning is that you never know when or where it’s going to strike.

Such was the time I was at a Boy Scout summer camp in W. Lee, Mass. when we were enveloped in total blackness from clouds roiling in from the west. The rain fell so hard that you couldn’t see more than three feet from outside your tent. We were in one of those big miner tents that had four bunks in it—two to each side. I was sitting on the far bunk down from the camp counselor who was sitting on the edge of the bed facing toward me. He was a Bee Gees fanatic and was nuts about their new release: “I’ve Got to Get a Message to You.” With his GE am transistor radio tuned into WBEC, he was trying to sing along with the Gibb brothers, but was having a hard time trying to get good reception with all the static that was crackling through the speaker. He picked up the radio to see if could find a stronger signal with the antenna.

No sooner than he did, zap, a sizzling, white hot lightning bolt struck the tent pole, exited into the antenna, blew through the radio and struck the counselor, knocking him a clear five feet outside the tent. The tent pole and radio were smoldering. One of the scouts from the tent next to ours ran out to check on the counselor. I was stuck on the bed, still blinded from the flash. The scout that went to help the counselor yelled for me to come help him. I stood up and noticed I was shaking all over and it seemed to take me forever to finally get my feet moving. I wasn’t hurt, but for a second after the flash and the enormous bang that followed, I thought I had died.

We both rolled the counselor over. His color didn’t look very good, and his breathing was shallow. I ran off to the administration building to find one of the scout leaders. The counselor was eventually carried off on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance, and was taken to the hospital. We later learned he had suffered second to third degree burns on both his hands, and that he also suffered burns on his stomach and back. As bad as it seemed at first, though, we were told he was going to be OK.

The rain started to let up. I closed the umbrella and as I did, I noticed a squirrel on the pine tree to my right peering down at me. Except for a few small twitches of its tail, it almost looked frozen. Maybe it was the umbrella that had drawn its curiosity. I could imagine if I were a squirrel, I would be puzzled if I had come across something like that. Although I couldn’t imagine what the squirrel could have possibly thought what an umbrella might be. A giant black mushroom, perhaps, the biggest black mushroom it had ever seen. It twitched its tail a couple more times and then turned and scurried back up the tree.

As I made my way toward the back part of the trail that wraps along the edge of the Buffalo Bayou, I found out I’d have to take a different route. The back part has quite a few knolls that are fun to run down and up on. Not so fun, though, after it’s rained. Soil here in Houston is mostly clay, and after it rains, it feels like you’re walking on Crisco.

When I came to the first knoll and stepped off, I slid down like I was on a nice ride at a water slide park. With my right hand, I stuck out my umbrella to break the slide, and with my left hand faced palm down, I broke my fall. I almost went down again when I tried to stand up, but with the support of my umbrella, and a tree branch hanging close by, I finally pulled myself back up. My walking shoes were globed in a thick coating of mud that became heavy with pine needles and leaves as I started to walk along an alternate trail.

The rumble of thunder could be heard again in the distance. Only it was not from the storm that had just passed. I walked to a clearing and looked to the north, the sky a purplish black. I decided I had enough adventure for one day, and headed back to the car.

All quiet on the home front

"War - I know it well, and the butchery of men
Well I know. . .”
Homer, The Iliad

Houston, Texas -- This first day of June 2008 is turning out to be a real scorcher. It’s just past noon, and the temperature’s at 94 degrees with a heat index of 101. In spite of the hot day we’re having, I head out to Memorial Park for my Sunday afternoon walk on the mountain bike trails that meander through a lush green and densely vegetated forest featuring giant loblolly pines and massive water oaks.

In a city the size of Houston, it is good to have a place such as this. As soon as I step into the forest, the canopy erases any sense of being in a large metropolitan area. It isn’t too long before you find yourself taken in by the smell of pine and magnolia. Aside from the physical benefits of a five mile hike, it is also good to have a place for wrestling with any particular angst you may be experiencing, which, in my case, I have been experiencing a lot lately.

It’s been one year since my son was deployed to Afghanistan with the 173^rd Airborne Division. He’s a paratrooper assigned to 2^nd Platoon, Battle Company, 2^nd Battalion, 503^rd Infantry. Since “Operation Rock Avalanche,” last October, his unit has made its home at Firebase Restrepo in the Korengal Valley; an outpost built on a mountain outcropping, “rockbag” by “rockbag.” It was named in honor of Army medic Pfc. Juan Restrepo, who was killed by small arms fire after his unit came under attack by the Taliban.

In an article that appeared in the January 2008 issue of “Vanity Fair,” Sebastian Junger wrote: “The Korengal is widely considered to be the most dangerous valley in northeastern Afghanistan, and Second Platoon is considered the tip of the spear for the American forces there.”

Certainly his time over there has not been easy for him or the men he serves with, but they have handled the situations they’ve had to face remarkably well, especially the cold winter months they had to endure. But with the generous donations they received from friends, family, and the community of Belfast, Maine that adopted the 173^rd, they had an ample supply of tuna, beef jerky, hand warmers, arctic socks, and thermal underwear that made being out in the cold a little easier to take.

When I asked my son in an email how he was holding up to the weather, I got a response that was the best possible assurance he could give me that he was going to be just fine: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this cold before. It got down to -5 or so. And you know it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in -degree weather; after all, it got to -30 once in Maine. But I was never like, hmm, let’s go . . . sleep outside in it.” And sleep outside in it they did through three long months of sub-freezing temperatures, snow, and ice.

When my son was here on leave last month, you never got any sense from him that he had been through one hell of an ordeal. It was so good to finally see him. Running around for whole a year carrying 80 to 100 pounds of weapons, ammo, and other equipment has put muscles on him that make young women fawn into long stares whenever he walks into a bar or nightclub. We spent one night in Austin to take in the “blues scene” and I had just as much fun watching the young ladies clamoring around him as I did listening to the music.

Needless to say, I will be glad when he is finally home safe and sound. It has been hard not to worry about him. I try to assure myself constantly that he will be OK but even still, it is not a particularly easy thing to do. That quintessential “What if?” always seems to linger in the back of my mind.

While leaning against a giant pine overlooking the meandering water of the Buffalo Bayou, it occurs to me just how scarred to death I’ve been these past several months that something terrible might happen to him. And even though I felt relived when he was here on leave, I have started to feel anxious again knowing that he’s back in the thick of it, and has three hard months left to go.

Sometimes I chide myself for even thinking such thoughts, but the truth is I really don’t know how I would react should I ever become the parent who comes home to find two Army soldiers waiting for him at his doorstep. I can only imagine the pain and grief a parent experiences over the loss of a son or daughter killed in action. I cannot say what that experience would be for me. It is one I hope I never have.

Even though it is a sultry hot afternoon, the shade from the trees towering above, with a slight, constant breeze, makes for a comfortable walk along the trial that runs along the bank of the bayou. I reflect back on a letter he had written to his grandmother that he shared with me. In describing his experience in the Korengal, he said:

There's no other time in your life
that you will feel as alive as you do
in the seconds that you are in a real
firefight. There is no comparing it.
Jumping out of a plane is one thing:
you face the probability of death with
a certainty of success. Success is not
guaranteed in the Korengal. Everyone
wears the same face; everyone gets the
same feelings. We all are aware that
every bullet has a final destination.

Spoken like a true warrior with keen insight and understanding of the reality he has to contend with each and everyday.

As I head back to my car, I reminisce on my experiences I had with him during his childhood. Among my favorites was the time when he was three years old during the Christmas of 1989. We had just finished decorating the outside of the house with blue Christmas lights. He liked the effect so much that he wanted to camp outside in front of the lights. And so I pitched the tent, piled in lots of blankets and rolled out the sleeping bags. It was a cold night, but not anywhere near as frigid as were the long winter nights he experienced in Afghanistan.

It is good to spend time out here in the woods. I especially like how the mid-afternoon sun filters down from the tops of the trees, enhancing the lushness of the undergrowth. As I walk out from under the canopy, I am greeted by a blast of hot air from the parking lot. “He’ll be just fine” I say to myself. “He’ll be just fine.”

By S L Cunningham

Published in The Waldo Independent, 6 June 2008