Each second, more than a hundred lightning bolts strike the earth. Each travels 90,000 miles per second, each burns more than 50,000 degrees, each is just about as thick as a pencil. Lightning is the most powerful natural electric force on the planet, responsible for billions of dollars in damages each year, the second leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States.
Ancient Greeks thought lightning came from the god Zeus, who hurled thunderbolts at sinful mortals from Mount Olympus. The Vikings thought the flashes shot from the hammer of Thor. Native Americans in the Southwest thought lightning rumbled from the great Thunderbird. Philosophers had their own ideas: Aristotle concluded that lightning was the ignition of fumes within thunderheads, while Lucretus said it was a collision between clouds. Finally, after a series of dangerous experiments in 1752, Benjamin Franklin determined that lightning was indeed a weather-related electrical phenomenon.
Today a sensor network in Arizona can pinpoint every ground strike in the United States. Yet authorities still do not know exactly when or where lightning will strike. On average, 1,000 people in the United States will be hit by a thunderbolt this year; of those, a hundred will die. Florida is the nation's lightning capital, averaging forty people struck by lightning each year, of which about ten will die. On June 2, Boulder news reporter Christopher Anderson, age thirty, was fatally struck while walking along a Fort Lauderdale beach with his girlfriend. Colorado ranks second for lightning strikes, according to the National Weather Service, but rated only tenth in the country for lightning casualties between 1959 to 1994, with 61 deaths since 1980 alone. On May 19 of this year, nineteen-year-old Rickie DeLeon was struck while walking along U.S Highway 36. It was the first lightning death of the year, but it was only the beginning.
June ushers in lightning's mean season, which lasts through August. To help prevent fatalities, the National Weather Service launched its first-ever lightning-awareness campaign last week. But even with all of the safety tips, this year some 25 Coloradans will be hit by lightning in the mountains, along lonely highways, on suburban golf courses, such as the one struck Monday in Broomfield. Those who survive will endure a painful ordeal that scientists are only now beginning to understand. Many will never be the same.
If Garry Rudd didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have any luck at all. He fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car into a bridge. He got caught alone in a blizzard for two days. He was shot in the knee during a bow-hunting accident. He fell through a frozen lake while measuring the thickness of the ice. If something bad was going to happen, it would happen to Garry. For a time, he even thought God was against him.
"Yeah," he grumbles. "People say I have lousy luck."
Garry was born in Louisiana on July 15, 1944, the third of four children. His dad was a prison guard from upstate New York, his mother a farm girl from the Bayou. He spent his childhood bouncing between the two states like an errant electron. "Trouble at home," he says.
"I guess I was incorrigible," he explains. "I had a mind of my own. I wanted to do things my way. After a while, they decided they weren't going to take it anymore."
His parents sent him to a Catholic school to learn discipline, respect and manners. He didn't. So he headed to a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana, where his poor but resourceful relatives taught him ironworking, blacksmithing, farming, tree cutting, engine repairing, hunting and fishing.
"You name it, we did it," Garry recalls. "Whenever something needed to be done, those people not only took you with them, they showed you how to do it. Sewing on a button. Peeling a sunburn. Shoeing a horse. We were always saving things and hauling stuff home. We'd drag nails up from the dirt with magnets and straighten them out. Until I was eighteen, I didn't know you could buy a new starter for a tractor. I thought you had to keep on fixing it."
Down south, Garry picked up a Cajun-French accent as thick as jambalaya. When he returned to New York to visit, no one understood him. "People treated me like a freak," he says. But the taunting only strengthened his resolve. Although he'd never made it past the eighth grade, Garry vowed to better himself.
"I saw things that I knew I wouldn't get unless I had an education," he says. "So I set out to get educated. And I put myself through a lot to get educated, too. I used to carry around books under my shirt and stuff. With me, it was a 24-hour thing. And self-education was fine with me."
Garry joined the service at eighteen, got married, had kids. In his spare time, and after his discharge in 1967, he studied English, linguistics and diction so he "wouldn't sound like Jethro," and completed university courses in the humanities, biology, chemistry, math and animal husbandry. All told, he compiled 128 hours of college credits without earning a degree. "I couldn't keep up with the pace," he explains. "I kept changing curriculums until it finally ended up going sour on me."
He and his wife divorced, a close friend committed suicide, and his family troubles intensified. "It seemed like I was a blind kid being raised by a deaf family," he says. "I felt that if I stayed away from them long enough, they'd be glad to see me when I finally returned, but it never happened."
Early one morning, after a long night of partying, Garry nodded off as he drove to work at a tree-trimming company in upstate New York. In the crash, he cracked his ribs, shattered his hip and nearly died.
"That was a big awakening," he says. "After that, I decided to get my life started. I had to stop expecting things to happen and just do them."
One of the first things he did was marry a serious and resourceful nineteen-year-old named Linda. For their honeymoon, they visited Linda's father in Denver and fell in love with the mountains. Garry thought he needed a change of scenery, anyway, so they packed their clothes in two plastic garbage bags, grabbed his toolbox, and landed in Colorado for good in 1974. But in the beginning, they almost regretted their decision to move to Denver.
"We never went out after dark," Garry says. "We'd count our cigarettes to make sure we'd have enough to get us through the night. We believed everything we heard about the city."
Garry's still not much of a city guy. He's uneasy in crowds, uncomfortable behind a desk, unaccustomed to the urban bustle. A bandanna dangles from one back pocket, and a tin of chewing tobacco bulges from the other. He hates phones and, until recently, seldom used clocks, preferring to gauge the time of day by the angle of the sun.
"I've always been like that," he says. "It's hard to get me to come inside. I'm always trying to find something I can do outdoors."
All of those skills he'd picked up outdoors paid off, though. Garry easily found jobs cutting trees, selling lumber, driving trucks and welding. For five years he crafted stainless-steel boxes for a manufacturer that supplied Rocky Flats, but he quit after his boss refused to give him time off during deer-hunting season.
Then he took a position with the Colorado Division of Wildlife and spent the next decade building and designing bear traps, hatchery equipment, soil sifters, stream-cleaning devices and even a camouflage wildlife-observation trailer. With his Bayou background, Garry also became the designated cook at official DOW functions, where his barbecue was legendary.
Still, he longed for a job where he could apply his other talents and interests, including biology, farming and law enforcement. So in 1992, Garry became a wildlife technician working out of Salida. He hoped that he would be managing, cultivating and patrolling state lands; instead he found himself doing busywork such as map checking, fence mending, dumpster repairing and trash collecting.
"I basically waited around for something to do," he says. "I was paid to be available. I felt like an outsider. I felt completely ignored."
Garry's headstrong and outspoken personality didn't help matters. Eventually, he was literally put out to pasture, given the job of irrigating sixty acres of hay in the Ouray State Wildlife Area three miles southeast of Salida. But there, using techniques he'd learned as a kid, he started to thrive. So did the land, which eventually produced more hay than it had in years.
"I loved it," he recalls. "I'd just sit there with my lunch and smell the alfalfa blowing in my face and think, 'This is God's country. I could do it the rest of my life.'"
Essentially, lightning is the electrification of a cloud, caused by the right combination of water, heat, ice and friction. Moist air is warmed by the sun, then rises miles above the earth to form clouds. As water particles ascend, some become too heavy and fall to the ground as rain. Others continue upward on strong air currents until they freeze into hail, then drop.
Millions of collisions occur between the rising and falling rain, ice and other particles, transferring electrical charges between them. Rising particles become positively charged, while falling particles become negatively charged. The cloud turns into a huge battery, with positive charges at the top and negative ones on the bottom, along with smaller pockets of positive charges.
Normally the earth carries a negative charge, but as a thunderstorm passes, objects on the ground beneath it become positively charged. When the electric forces exceed the resistance of the insulating air, a massive current is released. The flash super-heats the surrounding air to five times the temperature of the sun. The air expands, vibrates and resonates as thunder.
Although most lightning travels from cloud to cloud, it also travels from cloud to ground and even from ground to cloud. The zigzag path it chooses is entirely random, dictated simply by the quickest way to the earth. That could be mountains, buildings, trees, light poles, people.
On July 28, 1999, Garry Rudd woke at 4:30 a.m., slipped on his uniform -- blue jeans and wading boots -- and drove to the Ouray land. It was irrigation day, and he arrived with the first rays of pale lavender light. This was his favorite time of day, when he could be alone with his shovel, savoring the aroma of wet soil, listening to meadowlarks, watching deer pick through the grass.
"It's like I was the last man on earth," Garry recalls. "It was just so peaceful."
He released water into fields that were knee-high with hay. Then he stopped by a Wal-Mart diner to chat with a few irrigation buddies. After checking the pasture once more, he drove home for a coffee break with Linda. As they chatted outside on the patio, Garry noticed a thunderstorm raging to the northwest.
"That's unusual," he remarked. "Here it is, only ten in the morning, and already there's lightning up there. I've never seen that this early."
Garry drained his cup, cleared the table and detailed his afternoon itinerary for Linda: He'd return to a section of ditch just south of the Ouray property that had become clogged with dead branches, matted grass, fallen leaves and broken sticks. He'd work a few hours, then return home around 5 p.m.
Linda nodded. She knew the area well; she and Garry had shared a picnic lunch beside the pasture.
Garry kissed his wife goodbye and wheeled his F-250 to the warehouse in Salida, where he hacked off a block of ice for his cooler and gathered his tools. On the way out, he told his boss where he was headed.
Around 1:30 p.m., Garry bounced down the dirt road beside the hay fields and parked near the gate. He collected his gear, including a pitchfork, a hand-operated chain hoist and assorted odds and ends, then made for the ditch.
It was a beautiful afternoon, just 78 degrees. As he ambled through the open field, Garry scanned the horizon. To the west, the snowcapped Sawatch Mountains towered like icebergs. To the northeast, above Aspen Ridge, dark storm clouds rumbled. Garry didn't like the idea of being caught in the rain, but at that time of year, in that part of the country, thunderclouds traveled east. Unless something unusual happened, he'd be fine.
Not far from the bank of the ditch, near a clump of thirty-foot cottonwoods, Garry realized that he'd forgotten his water and two-way radio, so he dropped his backpack, stuck his pitchfork in the ground as a marker and lumbered back to the pickup, where he took a long pull from the water bottle and clipped the radio onto his belt. Back in the field, he retrieved his gear, slung one strap of the backpack over his left shoulder, slipped a tin of chewing tobacco from his pocket and pinched off a thick plug. With the sun on his shoulders and a blue sky above, Garry reached for his pitchfork.
In the U.S., the odds of being struck by lightning are one in 600,000.
Garry woke up face-down beside the ditch. He smelled burning hair. He felt like his clothes were on fire. He could not catch his breath. He tried to stand, but he couldn't, so he crawled into the ditch to douse the imaginary flames. He lay in the cool water several minutes, then pulled himself onto the muddy bank, slowly rotating his legs to drain the water from his rubber boots. He lay motionless a long while, trying to regain his bearings.
He knew he was hurt, but he didn't know how it had happened. He thought he had tumbled down one of the steep embankments alongside the ditch and struck his head. He mustered his strength and wriggled under a cottonwood to rest. He was cold, very cold. A surge of pain shot through his right hand. He held the hand to his face and saw what he thought was a sliver of bone protruding from the back. He yanked the bandanna from his back pocket and wrapped it around the wound, pulling the knot tight with his teeth. He shivered uncontrollably.
Recalling his survival training from the military, Garry burrowed into the bank and covered himself with dirt. He positioned his body toward the sun, estimating the time at 2:30 p.m., and scooped more sand onto his legs and torso. Suddenly, his body convulsed. His chest and stomach burned. His arms and legs ached. His ears rang, his head throbbed and his muscles tensed. He thought he was dying.
Then he remembered his radio. Through the sharp, blinding pain, he managed to twist up the volume on the squelch control. As long as he could hear the static, he told himself, the batteries would be charged. He pressed the transmit button and tried to speak, but he was not sure what, if anything, he said.
At dusk, Garry realized that his body no longer ached. His hands no longer trembled. But he could not shake the dreamlike haze that hung over him. He thought he had misplaced the typewriter in his truck and lost his tools in the irrigation ditch. He buttoned his shirt, fastened his belt, zipped his fly again and again. He imagined himself standing up and searching for his gear. He thought he picked up his radio and said he was afraid to die.
Then he thought about his family. He didn't want his wife and daughter to think he had killed himself because he was depressed over his job. Somehow, he slipped a pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled a note on the back of a work schedule: "Please give this to my wife, Linda Rudd. I was hurt bad somewhere. A bad fall. Lost. Can't walk. Dark. Radio dead. So sorry this happening. Trying hard to get through this. Please forgive me if I don't. LOVE YOU GUYS."
He adjusted his clothes once more, checked his fly again, and realigned himself into what he hoped was a dignified position. He did not want to be embarrassed, even in death. As night fell, Garry closed his eyes. He felt calmer now, serene, as if he were floating on ocean waves.
Of the people struck by lightning, only one in ten die, mostly from heart failure.
Lightning does not set people aflame. It does not reduce them to ashes. It does not leave them electrically charged. Lightening can flash along the outside of their bodies before discharging, or it can enter and travel through internal organs.
Most survivors suffer only minimal burns, usually first- or second-degree. Third-degree burns are rare, unless a person was wearing jewelry or came in contact with metal. Some suffer eye damage, others sustain ruptured eardrums. But lightning can also harm the nervous system, can injure the spine. And this, doctors say, is where lightning does its greatest damage.
Garry woke up under the fluorescent lights of a Salida hospital. When he didn't return home at 5 p.m., Linda had rung his cellular phone again and again, tried his pager and called his office. After sundown, she'd searched the edges of the Ouray hay fields, coming within 1,200 feet of Garry's pickup. But in the darkness, on the edge of private property, she'd left without noticing the vehicle.
At 11:45 p.m., a search party of DOW workers and sheriff's deputies finally spotted Garry's pickup and then found him beside the ditch, delirious and disoriented but alive. Garry saw the flashlights bobbing toward him but thought that a group of kids were playing a game with him. When his rescuers arrived, he couldn't understand what they were saying, and he mumbled something about his tools.
At the hospital, doctors gave him oxygen, which cleared his head, and conducted a battery of X-rays, CAT scans and blood tests. His head and ears ached. His right hip burned. His right hand throbbed. It wasn't broken, as he'd thought, but had been pierced by a five-inch sliver of pitchfork traveling at the velocity of a .45-caliber bullet. He also had a four-inch gash on his right thigh and another two-inch cut on his right calf. His torso and right foot were covered with tiny red splotches resembling cigarette burns; the largest, about the size of a pencil eraser, was on his right hip.
Doctors were confused by Garry's injuries, which weren't consistent with a fall. Perhaps he'd had a stroke. Maybe he'd suffered an epileptic seizure. Or perhaps, someone suggested, he'd been struck by lightning.
Garry was airlifted to St. Anthony's Hospital in Denver, where doctors confirmed that he'd been hit by a thunderbolt. Even with the storm more than a dozen miles away, Garry's pitchfork had acted as a lightning rod. When he grabbed the tool, a massive electric flash had entered through his right hip, spread over his chest, stomach and right leg, then exited through his right thigh, calf and foot. The burns on his clothes seemed to confirm this: Tiny holes had been scorched into his jeans that corresponded with the burns on his leg; on the right hip, a quarter-sized hole had been burned around the rivet.
The pitchfork itself had blasted apart into a hundred pieces.
After more tests, doctors determined that Garry had not suffered a heart attack or respiratory failure. He had, however, lost 40 percent of the hearing in his right ear. A neurologist and lightning-strike specialist also determined that Garry's memory was spotty, that he had trouble recognizing numbers, and that he had difficulty with his coordination. But since the injuries weren't life-threatening, Garry was released after four days. His doctors hoped that he'd get better within a few weeks, as many strike survivors did.
He didn't.
Lightning-strike survivors can suffer from over ninety symptoms, ranging from insomnia to vertigo to irritability to panic attacks to stiff joints to headaches to diminished sex drives. But MRIs and CAT scans can appear normal. Some people can be seriously injured by lightning and not have a scratch on them. It's like a computer damaged by a power surge, doctors say. On the surface, the hardware appears fine, but when the machine is rebooted, the software malfunctions.
As U.S. Highway 285 passes through Turkey Creek Canyon, it switches, turns and snaps around like a sidewinder. Garry had driven the route a thousand times as he traveled between his home in Buena Vista and Denver. But on the ride home from St. Anthony's, as Linda rounded the sharp curves, Garry thought he had passed through hell.
"It felt like my brain came loose and was sloshing around in my head," he recalls. "Slapping against one side of my head, then slapping against the other side. Trying to follow those turns left me completely exhausted."
That was just the beginning. A week after the strike, he still felt disoriented. He shuffled around in a medicated daze. He couldn't speak clearly. He mistakenly thought it was August 1997 -- two years earlier. He'd gaze out the window at an airplane, and his mind would suddenly "lock up." As he tried to follow moving objects, he felt as though someone were flicking a switch on and off in his head.
"I'd look at something and then turn away, but I would still see it for a few seconds," Garry says. "My mind was still trying to process what I had just seen. I'd look in the rear-view mirror and see a red car behind me. Then I'd look out front and still see the red car. I'll tell you what, it's quite a surprise to see what you think is a car coming straight for your windshield."
He was always tired. Activities that once took a few minutes, such as loading a dishwasher, seemed to take hours. He'd forget his birthday, his address and his phone number. He'd gaze at the kitchen clock and struggle to determine which direction the hands moved. He'd open the front door and forget to shut it. He'd sift through pocket change and forget how to count.
"I had studied for a degree in biology and animal husbandry," Garry says. "I took college calculus and trig. But after the injury, I couldn't get past simple arithmetic."
Linda had been told not to leave him alone outside because he might wander off and get lost. He once stepped out the back door to go to his workshop, tripped over a rock and panicked. "It was only sixty feet away, but I couldn't figure out which direction I needed to take to get back," he recalls.
He suffered nightmares. He'd grind his teeth in his sleep. He became terrified during thunderstorms, clutching the sofa so tightly that Linda thought it would break.
Then came the seizures. Garry would be talking or watching television, and his face would suddenly go blank. He'd stare straight ahead in a daze, then snap to attention. "It was like I'd wake up and find myself in a place that I didn't realize I was in," he says. "One time I lost eight hours that way."
Another time, he had just poured a cup of coffee and settled back on the sofa when he felt a tremor building inside him. His hands trembled, his body tensed and his jaw locked. When he awoke, one of his front teeth was broken.
The pain from his other injuries was constant. His hip burned. His ear ached. His head throbbed. So Garry took pain pills. Dozens of pills. Enough pills to fill a plastic grocery sack with empty bottles.
At 55, Garry was a fit and wiry light-heavyweight. Before the lightning strike, he'd walked twelve miles a day. He had no history of serious psychological or physical problems. This new litany of debilitating ailments threw him for a loop. "I was at the age where I was used to things going one way," he says. "All of a sudden, that stopped."
Garry blamed his colleagues for not noticing his disappearance sooner. He blamed himself for not heeding the looming thunderstorm. He blamed God for the endless torments he'd suffered. Sometimes he thought he was going crazy. Other times he wished he'd never survived.
"I'd think, if I had died, look how much better off my family would be," he says.
It was hard on his family. Linda took months off from work to care for him and drive him to and from Denver for appointments. Their daughter, Colleen, who was often left with friends or family, began to feel abandoned. Although they were close, frustrations built.
"I just wanted to know how long this would last," Linda says. "But we could never get a concrete answer. At first it was two weeks, then six months, then two years. To tell you the truth, I don't think they really know."
Unlike many strike survivors, though, Garry never had trouble with his insurance company. No one doubted that his ailments had resulted from the lightning flash; workers at a nearby hatchery even reported seeing a lightning bolt near the Ouray property that July afternoon. Garry was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress syndrome; he retired from the DOW with workers' compensation and disability benefits. He also received cognitive training, physical therapy, counseling and medical treatment.
They weren't enough.
Garry had always considered himself an independent and resourceful man, someone who'd taken care of himself and provided well for others. But after the strike, he couldn't read a measuring tape, operate a welding torch or earn a paycheck.
"It was frustrating as hell," he says. "I thought this would be one of those things where they'd put you in the hospital, hook you up to an IV and you'd get better. I never realized that all they'd do is give you directions and that you'd have to relearn everything on your own. To make it worse, I'm a perfectionist. [Now] I can't do anything that requires math. I can't do anything that takes more than two hours. Then you add to that the seizures and the hearing loss and the dizziness, and what the hell can I do?"
Sometimes miracles occur.
Edwin Robinson of Falmouth, Maine, who'd been blinded in a car wreck, claimed he regained his sight after he was struck by lightning in 1980 at the age of 62. He was walking under a tree, trying to catch a chicken, when he heard what sounded like the crack of a whip. Then he passed out. When he woke up, he moved inside to his couch, began to munch on a sandwich and suddenly told his wife, "I can see that plaque on the wall. Not only that, I can read it!"
Greta Alexander of central Illinois, said she became psychic after being zapped in 1961. Pregnant with her youngest child, she was tossing in bed while a storm raged. Suddenly, lightning struck the house, blew out her bedroom windows and set her bed aflame. From the early '60s until her death in 1998, she aided police detectives, read palms and offered private consultations.
But the most amazing story may be that of the late Roy C. Sullivan, the "human lightning conductor" from Virginia. While working as a ranger in Shenandoah National Park, Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times between 1942 to 1977. The flashes blew off his big toenail, burned off his eyebrows, seared his left shoulder, scorched his legs, hurt his ankle, burned his stomach and singed his chest. One strike flipped off his hat, set his hair ablaze, blew him out of his car, ripped through both legs and knocked off his left shoe; he doused his head with a bucket of water and walked away. Sullivan died in 1983 -- not from a lightning strike, but of a broken heart: He killed himself after being spurned by a lover.
About six months after he was struck by lightning, Garry Rudd sat on his porch, studying a photocopy of a clock's face. He'd been given the picture by doctors at a head-injury rehabilitation clinic in Denver, where he had been trying to recover lost abilities.
As he understood it, his injuries were similar to those of someone suffering from a head injury. The areas of his brain that had been damaged during the strike would never heal, but the healthy areas of his brain could compensate. He would still have seizures and memory problems, but he could learn things. He could teach himself to add and subtract. He could learn to build a chair. He could tell time.
Logically, he knew that the hands on a clock moved in a circle, from right to left, but he couldn't make himself see it. He studied the photocopy again and again. Then he had an idea: He sat up and began to walk around his house. He imagined that the back door was twelve o'clock, the east side was three o'clock, the front door was six o'clock and the west side was nine o'clock. He circled his house again, this time with the photocopy, trying to anticipate which number came next. "From that I figured out that the hands only go in one direction," he says. "I began to tell time. I still screw it up, but I'm right 99 percent of the time."
The doctors were thrilled; one physician said he wanted he put Garry's idea in a can and sell it. But to Garry, there was nothing miraculous about it. He'd simply approached a problem the way he always had.
"I'm the type of person who will sit there and look at something until I figure out how to do it," he says. "It's like the people who run across the country on a wooden leg. They do it through their own determination. They could sit at home and tell people how they got hurt, but that won't do them any good. They've got to get beyond their doubts, scars and surgeries. I told myself, 'What can I do? How can I get myself through this?' What I came up with, I came up with mostly on my own, using my own creativity and imagination."
He gradually began to organize his life with a series of rituals, systems and props. Pocket notebooks became a memory aid. A compact disc became a way to tell when an hour had passed. A light above his stove became a warning signal that food was cooking. Sticks and boards became measuring templates. A calculator became a pocket companion. A wristwatch became a valuable accessory.
Slowly, Garry began tackling household projects. He built an awning above the back door, dug a trench in the front yard, crafted a $1,300 black walnut table for the Denver clinic. He even eased behind the wheel of a car, first using a motorized grocery cart, then a golf cart and eventually his pickup. He can't drive at night, navigate hairpin curves or reach 50 mph, but he can handle routes that he has memorized.
He no longer takes pain pills. He no longer relies on his cane. In May, Garry completed his final cognitive exercises at the head injury center. After two years, doctors pronounced him ready.
"That was a good day for me," he says. "I'm at maximum medical improvement. I'm as good as I'm going to get. Now it's up to me to practice, practice, practice."
His memory remains spotty. His hip still hurts. He has trouble processing information. And he continues to make mistakes. Several weeks ago, he forgot to turn off a drill press in his shop, grabbed the spinning drill bit and severely cut his hand. The injury "hurt like hell" and embarrassed him to no end, but Garry swallowed his frustration, returned to his shop, attached a warning light to the drill, and resumed work.
When lightning strikes, no place is completely safe. People have been hit while holding on to refrigerator doors in their kitchens, talking on telephones, reaching from their cars toward ATMs, working in garages, speeding on Jet Skis, burrowing in caves, hiding beneath boulders, standing on rubber mats. The best way to avoid becoming a statistic, authorities say, is to be prepared -- and to steer clear of thunderstorms altogether.
As a general rule, if you can hear thunder, you're a potential target. A storm doesn't have to be overhead before lighting strikes; thunderbolts have been known to travel more than ten miles before hitting the ground. Even after a thunderstorm has passed overhead, the danger is not over.
And despite the common misconception, lightning can -- and does -- strike in the same place twice.
Nearly two years have passed since Garry stood in that open field and reached for his pitchfork. He thinks about it every day. He still isn't able to easily participate in some of the activities he loves, such as deer hunting and welding. He is no longer the independent man he had once been.
Garry could spend his days lamenting his losses, but he won't. His injuries have forced him to view his life in ways he never before considered. He sees every misfortune that he has encountered, no matter how painful, as preparation for the life he now must lead. In spite of everything that has happened, he has survived. And there's only one way to look at that, he says: It's a blessing.
Besides, after all these years, Garry believes his luck is finally changing. Each Wednesday he travels to a market in Buena Vista and buys three one-dollar lottery tickets: one for himself, one for Linda and one for Colleen. Then he returns home and places them on his refrigerator door.
"Odds are odds," he says. "If I can hit lightning, then I can sure hit that goddamn lottery."
