Thoughts on golf courses and God
I AM struck by lightning. Seriously.
I have written extensively about it while living a good chunk of my life in the lightning capital of the US, central Florida.
I have seen and touched the scar shaped like a cross, the Christian symbol, on a golfer’s chest --left after he was struck by lightning. He lived. But the lightning’s heat, four times hotter than the sun, flashed across his body, vaporizing the cross leaving only the burn, now a scar.
It reminds me a little of the stories about how the Atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. in Japan incinerated its victims, leaving only their shadows burnt into the ground, like a radioactive Polaroid.
What are the odds you will be struck by lightning this summer?
Overall odds of someone in US getting struck by lightning in a year’s time is 1 in 700,000, according to National Geographic. (Some sources say 1 in a million).
Obviously if you like to golf in thunderstorms and raise your club to the heavens soaking wet and screaming like the bishop in Caddyshack, your odds of getting hit increase greatly.
Odds are greatly reduced when you are inside.
Mantra: Stay inside, go inside, during thunderstorm.
Do not seek shelter under a tree.
Or move to California where there are far fewer strikes and thus fewer deaths than there are in the South, especially Florida, which is the lightning capital of the US.
In Florida, lightning kills more people than alligators, sharks and tornadoes combined. In Alabama (and the U.S.) lightning over time kills more than tornadoes, although Alabama is one of the deadliest states for tornadoes.
I became interested and awed by the ferocity and frequency of lightning while living in Florida for about a dozen years working with the Orlando Sentinel. My first week living in Leesburg, my rented house took a direct hit from lightning, frying nearly every appliance in the house, including the washer and dryer. There was a black burn mark on my dryer and my washer, sitting side-by-side where the electrical charge must have jumped from appliance to appliance.
This is why you have renter’s insurance. No one was hurt but we were shocked as you might imagine.
This was late 1980s, early 1990s, and I became interested in lightning and wrote several stories for the newspaper and a cover story for the paper’s Sunday magazine.
I wrote a story for the Orlando Sentinel in the 1990s about two friends standing on the beach together as both were struck by lightning. One died, the other didn’t. The one who lived was having a hard time. “Why not me? Why her?” she asked. This lightning came on a clear day at Daytona Beach. A bolt from the blue. It’s a real thing with lightning. Out of the blue -- used to describe something coming without warning or understanding -- is not just a metaphorical device.
I bought a book, which I still have, called ‘All About Lightning’ by Martin. A Uman. I also re-read a book I remembered from college called ‘A Bridge over San Luis Rey,” by Thornton Wilder. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel is about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in which five people died. A friar becomes obsessed with documenting what led up to these deaths, by examining the lives of the victims.
Wilder said his book posed this question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?”
Is it random or not? Why not me? Why her? I felt an urge to seek out survivors of lightning strikes and wrote a Sunday magazine piece based on my interviews.
For some, or most, being struck was life changing both physically and emotionally.
One man I interviewed told me his golf story. He decided to play some mid-week, midday golf. Few were on the course because of those ominous clouds.
The guy never saw it coming. BAM. He was down and out.
Waking up, he and the medical staff discovered a curious burn on his chest. By the time I saw it many months later, the scar was highly visible, in the shape of a cross.
The scar came from a cross he wore on a necklace, a declaration of his Christian faith.
The lightning literally boiled the cross into vapor, burning his flesh, leaving its mark.
A lightning strike is more than four times hotter than the surface of the sun. That’s about 40,000 to 50,000 degrees for lightning, 11,000 degrees for the sun.
The golfer probably had the lightning flash over him extremely quickly a split-second, melting his necklace but otherwise not burning the victim. The truth is most lightning victims are not hit by a direct strike and so have a great chance of surviving.
Where does lightning come from? Ice in the clouds is one key ingredient but scientists admit there’s still a lot we don’t know. But does it come from above, from the sky, and come down to the ground? Or the other way around. Does it start at the bottom, in the mud, and travel up?
“In a sense it does both,” Uman says in his book.
Uman says the usual cloud to ground lightning strike begins with a downward traveling spark that is not visible. So it starts down. But it is met ‘some tens of yards above ground or, on the ground, by discharge.
“The bright, visible channel or so-called return stroke, is formed from the ground up ... that visible lightning moves from the ground to the cloud.”
Many scientists believe lightning is the spark that started life, that possibly a bolt from the blue, or a bolt from a roiling thunderstorm stirred the primordial soup in a pond or wetlands, and life began. If so, it would be interesting to know more about where that bolt came from. And how it did what it did.