Electrical Storms

 “The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.” Horace, Roman poet during the reign of Augustus

One hundred years ago, according to the Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” column, a severe electrical storm struck Northwest Indiana. Hawley Olmstead, President of the Prairie Club, was struck by lightning near his group’s clubhouse in the Lake Michigan dunes and died instantly. His friend Kenneth Ross, was caught in an undertow and drowned. A bolt of lightning struck a horse belonging to Chesterton resident Mrs. Joseph Wozniak, knocking it to the ground and rendering it unable to walk for some time. Mail service aviator Frederick Robinson took off from Gary, but the dire weather conditions forced him to make an emergency landing in a field near the Porter Swedish Lutheran Church.

When we lived atop a sand dune within the Indiana National Lakeshore, now a national park, we frequently observed lightning storms nearby over Lake Michigan. If they were accompanied by loud thunderclaps, we grew apprehensive. Usually, the worst consequence was losing power, though sometimes we’d be without electricity for hours or even days. Once, however, a bolt of lightning hit our house. While in the kitchen we smelled a worrisome odor emanating from the fireplace room. Our record player had been damaged; the smell was an electrical fire, and sparks were coming from the appliance. Toni quickly unplugged the device from the power source (the socket) and, except for the foul odor, averted greater damage. Later we found evidence out back that our house had been struck.

Golden Gate Bridge and orange sky

Thunderstorms are causing hundreds of wildfires throughout the west coast that have burned millions of acres, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents, and left the air quality in cities such as San Francisco so poor that breathing it into one’s lungs for a sustained length of time is the equivalent to smoking a carton of cigarettes. Fierce winds, draught conditions, and intense heat due to global warming have created near-apocalyptic conditions. As California governor Gavin Newsom declared, the future climatologists warned us about is upon us.

Oregon blaze

Jerry Pierce wrote that his mother in Oregon is living less than 30 miles from one of the many out-of-control fires.   Ray Smock recalled:

    I can remember when the skies in Gary, IN and Pittsburgh, PA looked forest-fire orange most of the time, sometimes depending on the wind, or when a stagnant inversion layer held smokestack emissions low. And the smell was awful. We got rid of a lot of the industrial pollution, only to succumb to our global failure to keep the planet's atmosphere from carbon dioxide pollution. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, but burning forests make it all too visible in other ways.

    As the physicist George Feynman reminds us, trees come from the air. They take in carbon dioxide from the air. They take in water that falls from the air. They convert carbon dioxide into a carbon-based thing called wood. They exhale some of the oxygen. When they burn, they release all their carbon dioxide, all their wood, and return to the air and leave a residue of ash.

    The fires will get worse. The skies will be orange more often. The CO2 in the air will increase. Nature is out of balance already. Not from the old industrial pollution, which helped, but from our current disregard over the last 30 years to stop the imbalance. This is so far beyond the old industrial pollution. Humans have just about changed the planet enough that we have basically ruined it for future generations. Even the trees, from which our species evolved, have turned on us because we have made it too hot for them to keep helping us.

When a teenager living on Third and Fillmore in Gary, Dorothy Mokry recalled trying to cross Fourth Avenue when it started storming and having her hands upright when she got a shock on her left hand and actually noticed sparks coming off her fingers.  It freaked her out and ever since, she worries about being outside during a lightning storm. She added: “Plus, now I have hardware in my ankle and always worry that it’s like an electrical conductor.” 

Before delivering a talk on “Novels as Social History” to my Saturday Evening Club (SEC) colleagues via zoom, Dave helped me get set up so the lighting and background were adequate.  After mentioning books I read on my own, such as “Peyton Place,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Advise and Consent,” “Hawaii,” and “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” plus so-called nonfiction novels by “New Journalists” Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer, I cited novels I assigned in twentieth-century American history courses, such a “The Jungle,” “Babbitt,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Native Son,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Rabbit Is Rich.” Finally, I read excerpts from my three favorite current favorite writers: Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Strout.

Larry Galler and Pat Bankston; below Vonnegut self-portrait 

As customary, each SEC member reacted to the talk for 5-10 minutes.  Most were complimentary.  Former IUN colleague Pat Bankston, now living in Florida, brought up having read the nineteenth-century William Thackeray novel “Vanity Fair” in college.  VU emeritus professor Hugh McGuigan noted that Charles Dickens and other English novelists first published their works in serialized form in magazines. Ben Studebaker brought up the current vogue for fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter series.  Larry Galler quipped that I was the first SEC speaker to use the utter the phrases mother fucker and blow job.  I had observed that many libraries banned Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), supposedly because it contained dirty words.  In one scene in question G.I. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s alter ego, froze under fire, prompting Roland Weary to yell, “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!”  Then Vonnegut added: “The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody – and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.” I also quoted from John Updike’s  novella “Rabbit Remembered” where grandson Roy joked about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities during the Senate impeachment trial:

   One wisecrack went: “President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the May 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB.” His father thought to himself, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”