I can see clearly now the rain is gone.

I find myself reflecting more on life as I approach the age of 60. For me, reflection is a component of my a quest to understand more about who I am; why I think and act a certain way. Charla and I, as couples might often do, provide some reflection for each other in a fun-loving way. We use words like complex and multi-dimensional. Others simply call us quirky. According to collinsdictionary.com “Something or someone that is quirky is rather odd or unpredictable in their appearance, character, or behavior.”

I’m going to grab onto the “behavior” part of quirky for a bit, although my family may argue there are other parts of quirky, I should explore first. Given that this is my story, I get to focus where I want to.

This past summer, we had a tornado warning locally here in Pennsylvania and I made everyone in the house go to a room we have in the basement that would provide the most protection if a tornado were to touch down in our proximity. During our time in the basement, a question came up as to why I was so afraid of storms.

There is enough evidence for me to label myself as having borderline Astraphobia. This is an irrational fear of thunder and lightning. Reflecting on my quirky behavior sometimes with thunder and lightning storms, I decided to investiogate why I might have this fear. Self-diagnosis isn’t the best approach, but since I’m borderline, I give myself permission to proceed.

Astraphobia can be caused by past traumatic events linked to thunderstorms and lightning. I have never been struck by lightning, nor have I witnessed any person struck by lightning, but I have been close enough to witness its effects on other things. Sometimes I feel like lightning seeks me out, much like an animal will sense a person’s fear and take advantage of it.

The dairy farm I grew up on, in Northern Vermont’s NEK sits at about 1200-1500 feet above sea level depending where you are on the farm. Water for the dairy cattle, the farm house, and for a while the house I grew up in, came from a spring about 2,400’ from the barn which is nearly a half mile. The pipe from the spring to the farmhouse and barn was a metal pipe that, at times, may have provided the conduit for the lightning to follow to the farm and farmhouse.

The farmhouse was built in the mid-1800s and was plumbed many years later. The water pipes inside the house were plumbed external of the walls such that they were fully exposed. I remember vividly, as a young child being in the farmhouse sitting on my grandmother’s lap during a thunderstorm when a bolt of lightning struck nearby, and a fireball was visible around the exposed water pipe zipping from one side of the room to the other. I don’t remember any fear being shown by my grandmother, other than she was emphatic that I didn’t move from her lap until the storm was over.

Being a little older, more than a half dozen times, cattle on the farm were struck by lightning, often multiple cattle at the same time. It was probably during this period, I came to realize the destructive force of lightning. The smell of singed animal fur and flesh was particularly strong when finding the dead cattle. Sometimes the singe marks were visible, sometimes not.

Mark Twain said that “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work."

One year in the 1970s, I spent the better part of the summer replacing plastic insulators on the electric fence around the cattle pastures. Plastic insulators were used to insulate the electric fence wire from the post it was attached to. It seemed that every time a storm came through, it struck the fence and the wire got so hot, it melted through the insulator and was sitting on the nail. When it melted to the nail the fencing system no longer worked. I remember replacing the “fencer” multiple times that year. The fencer is the device that provides the pulse of electricity on the metal wire. When an animal, or human touches the wire, it is what delivers the electric shock. I specifically remember a conversation where the man behind the counter at Agway stated, "Well, you have a one-year warrantee on the fencer, where it will be replaced without question." I remember during that summer bringing multiple fencers to Agway for replacement. On one particular trip, my father brought the fencer in a box in multiple pieces. The man behind the counter had a difficult time correlating the fencer to their brand to verify the warrantee. The lightning had melted the device almost entirely into a metal ball.

Across from the house I grew up in, were two water reservoir ponds about a quarter mile from the house. One pond was a couple hundred yards in front of the other. One afternoon during a storm, while looking out the front picture window, a purple bolt of lightning hit the pond the furthest away. A few minutes later when we thought the coast was clear, my brave cousins and I emerged from our respective houses and were heading to see what damage might have been caused by the lightning strike. We weren’t 50 feet from the house when the closer pond was struck by another bolt of lightning. Scrambling back to the houses, we would wait to explore at a later day.

The configuration of the barn was such that each cow had its own stanchion. Our stanchions were made from metal. They were meant to hold Holstein cattle which are the larger species of cattle for dairy. The stanchions were held in place with metal bolts into the cement. Each cow had a metal chain around their neck with a number tag so we could keep track of each animal. Between every other cow was a water bowl as can be seen in the photo below. The water bowl was made out of iron. The bowls had a flat piece close to the bottom such that when a cow pushed on it with its nose, water would fill the bowl. The entire water bowl was made out of iron.

The pipes going to the water bowls were iron pipes (in the picture they are a yellow plastic) and they ran just up from each cow’s front feet through the entire barn. Suffice to say, water, metal pipes, metal chains, and water bowls surrounded each animal in the barn.

For those that have never been in a mid-1970s barn like this, there is a gutter that runs the full length of the barn just behind the back feet of the animals. Our configuration had two rows of 60 cattle facing each other. There is a central motor and gears that was referred to as the gutter cleaner. When turned on, it works by pulling on the chain and the paddles pull animal waste along and deliver it to a location outside the building. The chain in the gutter cleaner is one continuous chain that goes around the inside of the entire building, all made of very heavy steel to manage the waste of a 120 cattle produced in a 24-hour period.

Because the winters in this part of Vermont are so cold and snowy, provisions are made to pile up the cattle waste throughout the winter and then take care of it in the spring. This requires what is called a manure stacker. This is a long, large conveyer that angles up at 45 degrees that takes the manure from the gutter cleaner and delivers it approximately 30 feet in the air. The manure stacker is constructed of heavy iron and steel.

One particular day, I was milking the cows with my father and grandfather. For us, this meant having milking machines that required us to get between two cows, milking one, then the other and then moving to the next two cows.

The sky was very dark, and as usual, my nerves were as tense as guitar strings. There was a continuous rumble of thunder which meant I would probably be replacing fencing insulators the next day.

I stepped out between two cows to empty the milk container and then it happened. The world visibly turned hot white. No motion, no sound, just white. Then came a loud hissing sound where every head of cattle in the barn simultaneously dropped to the floor, followed by the most deafening crack of thunder I have ever heard. It reverberated throughout the barn and my body. I felt like the cows looked and then as they sounded voicing their displeasure with the shock they had just received. With further investigation, it appeared the lighning hit the manure stacker, the gutter cleaner, and jumped to the metal water pipes and stanchions across the entire barn. Fortunately, all humans in the barn that day were not between any cows at that moment and we had rubber boots on which was assumed to be the reason we did not feel the shock.

After that day, my fear of lightning was fully solidified and if I needed to be outside during a storm, I would almost crawl on the ground to get from point A to B. If it was raining with any hint of thunder, I would make myself scarce such that I wouldn’t be assigned any outside chores.

The graph above depicts an increase in percipitation during the 1970s in Vermont. It is possible that there was an increase in storms leading to the precipitation.

As time has gone on, my fear of lightning has been reinforced by unknown forces. While living in central Vermont, I was on a long afternoon bike ride (the pedal type) when a storm blew in. There was a house close by with a person on the porch that motioned to me to come and get out of the storm. As the front door closed behind us, a bolt hit the tree 25 feet from the house. It traveled across a dog wire from the tree to the porch. There were black marks left behind on the porch. While living in Southern New Hampshire, as I was sitting in a living room chair, lightning hit a tree 16 feet from the house. The tree was blown apart. Half of it landed in our pool and half on the neighbor’s lawn. While on a business trip in Kansas City, my flight had to take off during a thunderstorm to make it back to the East Coast before a hurricane was going to hit the Boston, MA area. The plane was hit by lightning. As with what happened in the barn multiple years earlier, everything went white. This time the following noise was like you had put your head in a 55 gallon metal drum and someone then hit it with a golf club. It took out the navigation system on the plane and we had to land quickly. When I moved to Pennsylvania, coming home from work one afternoon, as I drove into my garage, lightning hit a tree on the property. The lightning followed the underground dog fence. The fencer blew apart just as I put the car in park inside the garage. I ran and grabbed a bucket of salt I had and poured it on the flames that had ignited some garden material.

Maybe my fear of lightning is rational after all.