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Lightning Strikes (luckily not me) [1]
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Date: 2025-01-02
A social media post on lightning rods reminded me of my own brush with lightning. This was decades ago, when I was young and stupid (I'm not young anymore). We were moving from Albuquerque to California, I was driving a 1980 Dodge D-150 that we'd bought from the US Gov't with about 200,000 miles on it, pulling a U-Haul trailer with all our belongings. My (brand new, just married—and yes we still have stars in our eyes for each other) wife was driving her 1984 Dodge Colt.
Just outside of Kingman, AZ, there's a a deep gully with a long, steep hill. It used to be called "Heartbreak Hill" back in the days of carburetors and mechanical fuel pumps. I hit that hill, and the fan belt broke. Within moments, the engine overheated and the top radiator hose exploded.
Well, I was an amateur shade-tree mechanic at the time (I'd helped pay for college that way—I'd put an ad in the college paper: "Shade tree mechanic. I'll work at your place. $10/hour plus parts." I stayed busy!).
I popped the hood and started taking things apart. My wife drove into Kingman to an auto-parts store, while I stood in front of the truck wrenching. This was an old truck with a "slant-6" engine, an inline 6 canted over 30° from vertical. Those were old workhorse engines, and more importantly for this story, they left a lot of empty space in an engine compartment designed to take either a straight 6 or a V8.
While my wife was running for parts, a thunderstorm rolled in. Bam, BAM, huge rain drops started thudding on the hood above me. Then my hair stood up on end. I dove quickly into the engine compartment and pulled the hood down over me. I'm not a graceful person—I'm all thumbs on both left feet, but I swear I dove with fluid grace. Moments later the world lit up as lightning struck the guardrail across the freeway from me, about 100 feet away. The thunder hit simultaneously, echoing for perhaps the next century within that engine compartment. My wife came back about 10 minutes later to find me sitting on the dirt beside the truck, covered with oil and grease head to toe, still dazed and very hard of hearing.
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