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By C. Jake Williams. June 17, 2008
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At the age of six I learned to fear lightning.
My parents tried teaching me to appreciate the power of spontaneous electrical storm currents, and maybe they succeeded to that end a little more than they had planned. If clouds filled the sky and rainfall our neighborhood gutters, our garage door went up nine times out of ten. Out came the lawnchairs.
It was the Batman television show equivalent of watching a sporting event. But instead of Blam! Pow! and Splat!, our two car enclosure echoed with Oooh! Ahhhh! and Wow!
And that's how my brothers and I learned lightning was something to enjoy, not fear. Until I was six.
The thing about rain that always fascinated me wasn't the water, and it wasn't the thunder. I played the part I thought my parents preferred me to play, so they probably still think I loved the lightning. They were and are wrong.
I have always been enthralled by the delayed appearance of worms after a heavy rain.
Hundreds of those slippery guys, oozing over the sidewalks in front of Chateau de Williams the way Slimer decorated the Ghostbusters set. How did so many of them exist below us, yet we only saw them on rainy sidewalks or hanging from a robin's beak?
The appearance of those worm invaders, which is either how I viewed them or how I justified killing so many of their masses, brought on innumerable questions for an eager mind to try to answer.
Does a worm have a heart? Where is it?
Does a worm have a brain? Where is it?
If I buried my large intestine in soft dirt before a storm, would it come up for air an hour later?
What is the pH of worm slime?
Are there any industrial uses for that stuff?
Why are worms brown?
Why do they stretch out on the sidewalk, even when they're not moving, instead of curling into a ball like a rattlesnake?
Are worms afraid of lightning?
These questions and countless others needed an answer, and I set out to obtain them. Until I was six.
Maybe the day before was a hot day, or maybe it had been raining for a week. I don't remember details like that, but I do remember that strike. I was in my garage moments before a bolt struck closer than any I had witnessed prior, but at that moment the garage offered me no protection.
Maybe I was putting an origami boat into the violent gutter waters. Maybe I was building a partial damn in the gutter to reroute the torrent. I don't remember why I was that far from the Chateau, but I remember the fear from that decimal point of a second when the lightning struck.
The flash was blinding. I saw the light before my eyes unblinked.
The sound was booming. God clears his throat before belting out a tone like that.
But what really struck me was the energy of the event, the static electricity that raised every hair on my body.
I was six years old and it scared the worm hunting out of me. Before the light faded or the sound subsided, I was back in the safety of the garage. Whoever holds the Guinness mark for the distance between my gutter and garage should consider himself lucky. Lucky that nobody was holding a stopwatch.
Seventeen years have passed since I dashed 40 yards in one second flat. I've watched rainstorms since then, but never without a roof over my head. I've kissed and been kissed in the rain since then, but never within thirty minutes of hearing thunder.
And worse of all, I'll probably never know if worms are afraid of lightning too.
You were there.