evanmorris.com

Three years ago this week.

Issue of August 8, 2005

So one afternoon in mid-July … I’m struggling to get an enormous air-conditioner into the west window of the living room. It’s 95 degrees with a heat index of 105 and there are nasty storms coming on the radar, but so far there’s only spotty rain and very distant thunder.

I finally balance the thing on the sill and reach up to lower the window. Kathy is coming downstairs and says something. I start to reply, still standing right up against the window. In the center of my field of vision, about five feet beyond the window, appears a brilliant ball of intense white light about the size of a basketball, hovering in mid-air.

Kinda like Tinkerbelle, but much bigger and brighter.

Just as this bit of weirdness registers on my mind, the ball of light explodes with a loud bang. A very, very loud bang. Shotgun-next-to-your-ear bang. Not a “boom,” a KA-BLAM

Much louder than Tinkerbelle.

I jump three feet backwards in the air and am out of the room in two more hops, then shakily sit down on the stairs. Kathy wants to call the squad but I’m too busy laughing and testing my fingers and toes.

At first I thought the air conditioner had somehow exploded, but apparently lightning had struck the tree outside the kitchen window, about ten feet away, and then rolled or bounced downhill in ball form to where I was and then exploded. Very weird. The tree shows typical burn signs of a strike, but the explosion was definitely about five feet away from the tree, in midair about three feet from the ground. I tend to think that if I had still been holding the air-conditioner at that moment I’d have been toast….

Yessiree, ball lightning, the holy grail of the hillbilly lifestyle. An’ I done seed it Yeehaw. Can I go back to New York now?

Although the house itself was not actually hit, apparently the electromagnetic pulse was sufficiently strong to seriously fry the telephone junction box on the other side of the house, as well as kill two cordless phones,the answering machine, the stove , a nice Kloss radio, the answering machine, and probably other gadgets we haven’t tested yet. The computers and network stuff were all completely unplugged from the wall, no connection to anything, but that didn’t stop the pulse from killing both the wireless bridge and the router and frying one computer. That’s some pulse.

Anyway, the right side of my head wasn’t really working for the rest of the week: bad headache, partial deafness, and weird numbness on that side of my noggin. Kathy says I was in an unusually bad mood in the days afterward, but c’mon, half the freaking house was broken.

Last updated on Thursday, July 10, 2008