[TheForge] OT Lightening story

[magichammer]

45 years ago when I was 10, I spent the summer with friends that had a
huge watermelon farm in rural southern Mississippi. One hot lazy morning
my friend Roy, his sister 'Cooter' and I were we were way out in one of
the fields busting open the ripe melons and eating the centers from them,
swimming in one of the ponds and just having a carefree time.
The sky turned gray, the wind started blowing and it began to sprinkle.
Since it was nearly lunch time, he headed for the house about a mile away.
As we were making our way through the endless rows of ripe watermelons
and the thick green tangles of vines and leaves the rain began to really
pour down.
Being young carefree children we delighted in the urgency and utter
hopelessness
of trying to beat the rain. We scampered toward the young oak tree that
topped the rolling hill, thinking that the tree would afford us some shelter
from the downpour. We were about 20 yards from the tree when lightning
came from the sky as if Thor himself had flung it. With an explosion that
knocked us to the ground and left us all temporarily deaf, the little oak
tree
had completely disappeared, blown to a billion bitts by the force of the
lightning.

dave m

>
> >
> >
> >         Lightning is some weird stuff.  Butthole's house was stricken
> >         about 6 years ago.  He and his wife were asleep when suddenly
> >         KA - *BOOM*.  Their antenna tower was hit, then jumped to the
> >         side of the house and blew a THREE foot diameter hole through
> >         the exterior wall, blowing them both out of bed.  One of the
> >         cats wound up cinged to a crew cut all over its body.  I showed
> >         up a couple days later and had I not seen the hole with my own
> >         eyes, I'm not sure I would have believed it.  They were told
> >         that it's something of a small miracle nobody was killed.  They
> >         told me the light was so bright that they thought the second
> >         coming was occuring right there in their bedroom.
> >
> >         There ain't much that scares me, but lightning turns me
> >         sheet-white.  I learned how to teleport from my back porch
> >         to the middle of my living room in what seemed under one
> >         second when lighning struck my back yard, not 30 feet from
> >         where I stood.  My hair was literally standing straight up,
> >         I was so scared.  To get the the living room you have to go
> >         though the porch, a 20' square kitchen, and a short hallway.
> >         I moved like an olympic athlete that day.
>