00:00:05 Speaker 1: There are three hundred billion strikes of lightning in the atmosphere of planet Earth each year, equaling one hundred strikes of lightning per second. And I've been long fascinated by the display of power of natural systems, giant waves, raging rivers, violent storms, but there is one that is the definition of flashy. When it comes to natural stuff that happens, the visual and auditory display of lightning's unhaltered power is unmatched. It's mysterious, far beyond the control of man, yet almost fully understood by science, predictable to a degree, inflicting instantaneous and oddly specific justice on whatever it strikes. All the while it's motivation, meaning why it strikes and where it does, is completely untrackable. Therein lies man's timeless fascination and fear of lightning. We're going to hear two stories of people struck by lightning, a hunter and a farmer, and it will literally put the fear of God in you did meet, and we're going to have a true nerd out talk about lightning with a true weather man. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. My name is Klay Nukelem, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF gear, American made us built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place. As we explore. On the morning of the third day, there was thunder and lightning. A cloud covered the mountain. All the people among the tents shook with fear. Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the Lord came down upon it in fire. Its smoke went up like the smoke of a stove, and the whole mountain shook. Moses spoke, and God answered him with thunder. Then the Lord came down. That was an excerpt from the Book of Exodus. Only in modern times, say the last three hundred years, has a crack of lightning been simply and wholly viewed as a science equation, the sum of a predictable sequence of positive and negative charges in the clouds arcing to the ground in a crack of thunder and lightning, fueled by a billion jewels of energy. But is it just that because it actually is just that it's science. But is it more? Was it more back when humans were primitive thinkers and were led around the nose by some irrational tomfoolery, or could still today? A flash of lightning be a window to something deeper, like a pop up advertisement on Facebook connecting the rational world to that sovereign, invisible, mysterious power source whose life pulsates on planet Earth that no equation can understand. I guess it matters how you choose to look at this thing. But don't get me wrong, I'm here for the science, but my experience on this planet has told me there's more. Like To introduce you to a bear hunter. 00:04:05 Speaker 2: My name is John Donovan, and back in September I was hit by lightning by wall bear hunting. Little backstory about the piece of property. I've been hunting it for about four years now and pretty much been after this bear for the three straight seasons and all off season. I was prepping the area, getting it ready, and then come opening day, no luck getting the bear. And then it was September eighteenth. I got out of work and got into the stand. I was right around one point thirty two o'clock in the afternoon and there was a weather cell pretty much in South Fayetteville, right over Greenland, and I was paying attention to it, and I kind of just felt an eerie feeling and there was a wind shift out of nowhere. And I was actually texting a buddy at the time, thinking, hey, can you check the way a little bit more for me? And you know, maybe it was it felt like ten minutes, but it was probably only two minutes. I feel the wind shift again, and I just had this eerie feeling, and I said to myself, like, I think I should get down stand, and probably fifty sixty yards behind me is this bluff. And I was thinking, let me just ride out the storm. I could tell it was probably gonna be a twenty to thirty minute storm. 00:05:22 Speaker 3: I'll get back up the. 00:05:22 Speaker 2: Stand and hopefully the bear comes in. 00:05:24 Speaker 3: So I this one stand my whole life. 00:05:27 Speaker 2: I always wear a safety harness because my dad actually fell thirty one feet out of a tree when I was a kid, and really, you know, it was a very scary time. He survived, thankfully, and so he harped all childhood that always have a safety harness, and we usually use the lifeline I think they're called, but this one stand. I didn't have it, and I have to get about ten to twelve feet up and then clip in. 00:05:51 Speaker 1: We all know that eerie feeling of an approaching storm, like John felt. It's an ancient one that's helped our species survive. We also know the feeling of being in cell range able to text, but not having good enough service to get the radar on your weather app to pull up. I was sitting in a tree that same day, September eighteenth, twenty twenty five, about forty miles away from John in Arkansas. He and I both heard rolling thunder in the distance. A slight wind began to blow, the sky darkened, and it felt like the sun was gonna set, even though it was only mid afternoon. And when those first drops of rain start to hit you, you get the sense I've got to get out of here. Because there's no square inch of planet Earth that's exempt from potentially being struck. And thirty seven million lightning bolts strike the United States each year. Rain, wind, and hail all cover these large areas. Think about this like macro picture of the places they cover. But it's the specificity of lightning that makes it so unnerving. We've all been in a thunderstorm, But how it picks out what and when to strike is what makes it so unnerving. Two people could be in a field and one struck and the other left completely fine. But as it turns out, one in six hundred thousand Americans will be struck by lightning. You heard me right, from the stats that I have found one in six hundred thousand, and that really seems high to me. But if you think about it, I bet you know someone or at least know of someone who's been struck. But that statistic doesn't necessarily mean that you personally have a one in six hundred thousand chance of being struck, because people who spend a lot of time outside have vastly higher odds of being struck than someone who rarely goes out, and other factors play in as well. As a matter of fact, if you're a man, you have a four times more likely chance than a woman to be struck by lightning, So the actual odds are closer to one in a million that you'll be struck, So you can rest easy. But John Donovan was one of them. This storm that came up on him was an isolated pop up shower and he thought it might miss him, so he hung out in the tree and he was after this big bear. He didn't want to get down. He's fourteen feet up this metal tree stand. As the front edge of the storm reaches him and it starts to rain. He hears a clap of thunder close and he knows that it's time to go. 00:08:34 Speaker 2: So I get situated. I get about one to two steps down, and then that's when I take the clip off, and then all of a sudden, one more step down and that's pretty much the last thing I remember until I woke up. Just heard a loud noise and I was out, and then don't really know exactly how long I was out or not out for, and then I just remember kind of waking up. And the only way I can describe it is if you've ever seen like a war movie where someone gets hit by a frag. I was everything was a slow motion. I'm looking all around and I just couldn't breathe couldn't, like, got the wind knocked out of me. And then I'm just looking all around and I just see stars and I just had no idea what happened. And smelt like a weird smell, but still didn't hit me on what actually happened. I thought I slipped, and I've long hair, of course, so my hat was all messed up and my hair was all on my face and I lift my hand up and something felt like it stabbed me in the forehead. And that's when I was reaching for my phone, and my phone was fried, but I was able to use like the glare of the black screen, and I just saw a welt, probably the size of a baseball. And that's when I just started panicking because I knew something bad happened. And again, still didn't even realize if I slipped, if it was lightning, or what it was really, but I just knew I had to get out of the woods. Something was telling me, you have to get out now. I don't know what was gonna happen, to be honest, So I start gathering, you know, my stuff, and my bow was probably ten or so feet away from me. So then I'm starting putting the clues together. I'm like, I don't think I fell, because if I fell, how did I get four feet away from the tree? How did my bow get there? And that's when I started realizing I'm pretty sure I just got hit by lightning, or the tree I was in got hit by lightning. 00:10:27 Speaker 1: It's odd to think that you'd be struck by lightning and not know it, but it actually makes perfect sense, as the electrical charge of lightning moves at two hundred and twenty million miles per hour. That's two thirds the speed of light, so it hits you before the sound of thunder because it's traveling faster than the speed of sound. So John is now laying bewildered on the ground a wound on his head from smashing against the ground, presumably, and his bow is lying several feet away. But we're gonna leave him right there for now. And I'd like to introduce you to another one in a million statistic. He's also my neighbor and friend. 00:11:16 Speaker 4: My name is Terrell Spencer, go by Spence. I own across the Creek Farm pastored poultry farm in West Fork, Arkansas. And I'm gonna talk about getting popped by lightning. So I was moving birds. A guy called me to talk about this decision I had, you know, and so we we talked a little bit, and I got off my tractor after talking to him and was hooking up chains and I was just like, you know what, maybe everyone else knows better than me. And I felt like like I was really supposed to do something, and I'm just like, I'm just gonna listen to everyone else are smarter than me. And I was really frustrated. And so we have these big structures are like twenty by forty. They're big, kind of imagine a greenhouse on skids, and that's what our hens are in. And I've got these two twenty foot logging chains. I hook up onto that structure, one on each side, and then I hook it up to my tractor and I pull it. So we got a routine. So I'm just kind of going through the motions. I hook those logging chains up, you know, and I've got like this rain slicker on, and I've got just this it might be the same pantomwhare Now they're just absolutely soaked, you know, my muck boots on, and uh, I'm feeding the birds. So on the front of the tractor. After I unhook the chains, there's buckets of feed. So I get the buckets of feed. I'm gonna put you know, three or four buckets feed in there, and I finish, and I'm carrying the buckets out. I open up the door, step out, shut the door, and I take a few steps, and I'm still kind of grumbling about this thing that I'm thinking on. I'm not even really paying attention to what I'm doing. And then all of a sudden, like out of the corner of my eye, like this pink purple color happens, and everything just kind of like when a movie fades, like you know, like in the end, like everything kind of turns a color. It was like everything started to turn that pink and and what is It was probably a split second, but it felt like a couple seconds, like I was like, wait, what's going on? And then there was an explosion and yeah, and like I'd been really close to explosions in the war, like i'd been, you know, I'd been tossing around by some rockets and that kind of stuff, and it was it was just like that, you know, like when you get hit so hard it feels like it knocks you out of yourself. 00:13:42 Speaker 1: Spence was in the United States Army and served in the Iraq War in the early two thousands. He saw some serious act of combat and know, not all of us know what it feels like to get knocked out of yourself. But whatever just happened to him, it was kind of like what happened in the war. It doesn't sound good, and you might ask how many people are actually getting struck by lightning. According to the CDC, from two thousand and six to twenty twenty five, there were five hundred and seventeen lightning deaths in the United States, adding up to twenty five deaths per year. In a wider look at history, lightning deaths peaked in the nineteen forties, when over four hundred Americans were killed in a single year nineteen forty three. During that time, the government started national marketing campaigns educating people about the danger of lightning. This helped, and lightning deaths have decreased in the last several decades since then, but clearly they aren't absent. As a matter of fact, as I'm writing this podcast, a fifteen year old boy was killed by lightning as he sheltered his thirteen year old younger brother for lightning on top of a Colorado mountain in late July. That's really hard to understand, and our condolences go out to that family. But the people who die are actually quite rare, because ninety percent of people that are struck by lightning live. On average, two hundred and seventy to three hundred people are struck each year, and John and Spence clearly survived. But what is lightning? I know? Just the guy to tell. 00:15:32 Speaker 5: Us hello, This is Joshua Weisel with Weather T two five tests us one two test us. 00:15:43 Speaker 3: All right, we are rolling awesome. So introduction for who I am. 00:15:48 Speaker 5: My name is Joshua Weisel and this is my company behind me. 00:15:53 Speaker 3: Weather T two five. 00:15:54 Speaker 5: I've been doing weather broadcasting since twenty fifteen and excited to be here and talk about some lightning. 00:16:03 Speaker 1: Josh is in his mid twenties and he's functionally a meteorologist. He doesn't work for a TV station, nor has he taken an established career route. I kind of view him like a weather outlaw, operating outside the mainstream system and absolutely obsessed with weather. He has his own streaming weather service called Weather two two five, where he is the chief weather analysis serving the four Corners area of Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. I think it's better than the Weather Channel, and I like the passion of it. 00:16:40 Speaker 5: So lightning is a phenomenon that obviously we have all encountered, you know, for whatever reason in this part of the country. I always laugh and tell people it's not that peaceful you know overnight thunderstorm that you can sleep to, and it's that peaceful rumble of thunder off in the distance. It always sounds like a bomb goes off. And so lightning is one of the more dangerous phenomenon with weather because it doesn't just have to be severe weather to occur. 00:17:08 Speaker 3: In order for lightning to occur, you. 00:17:10 Speaker 5: Typically need the warm and humid, unstable environment that we get here in the South, and that leads to taller storms. And it may sound weird, but you need taller storms in order for lightning to develop because aloft you get frozen iceed particles and you get water particles and they bounce around up in the updraft, and as they bounce around, they're kind of exchanging the charges and they start to conflict. So then you see the charges that they separate to the top and the bottom of the storm. And so you know, looking at how that works, negative charges go up, positive charges go down, and that's how you get lightning to start forming, is the charges. And again you need more of an unstable and humid environment, So that's why the South gets most of the lightning in terms of statistical deaths and occurrences. 00:18:06 Speaker 1: Lightning is the result of ice and water particles slashing around in a cloud, creating an electrical charge, kind of like a load of towels being tossed around in your dryer creating static electricity that zaps you when you touch it. The clouds are the towels, and your hand is the earth. The positive charges go up and the negative charges go down in the cloud, and then the positive charges on the Earth's surface attract those low hanging negative charges, and a bolt of lightning is born, kind of like an unheard of before anecdote being birthed and born right out of Brent Reeves's lips. And similar to his hot air, lightning heats up the air to fifty four thousand degrees fahrenheit, making it expand so quickly it creates a shockwave, a boot, a flash of electromagnetic radiation. And as John said, the South is the lightning capital of America. But Florida is the lightning capital of all the states, with more deaths than any other place, averaging between seven and ten per year. But Texas has the most lightning strikes, with around thirteen million striking annually, But Oklahoma, Oklahoma has the highest concentration of lightning, with seventy three flashes per square mile annually. To break that down the way it makes sense to me, Florida has more people, so more people get killed. They've also got a lot of ag in flat country. Texas has the bigger geographic area, so it gets the most lightning. But it sounds to me like Oklahoma actually has the most lightning. And that's probably the reason that this song was written in Oklahoma. 00:20:10 Speaker 5: When we were sitting on the front porch where the weather rolling. 00:20:15 Speaker 3: In, laughing louder than the big South end. 00:20:22 Speaker 5: He ran out to rule you, and the bladder ain't falling in your hair. He's hand leg checkers from a fool in chair country music in the kitchen, and hear it singing through the screen. 00:20:42 Speaker 3: Withather warns in. 00:20:44 Speaker 1: Twin that's the Turnpike Troubadour's song a tornado warning. There's no doubt the storm they wrote about had lightning in it. But let's get back to John Donovan who wished he'd had a weather warning. But remember he doesn't know what's happened he's woken up on the ground after blacking out. He's clearly falling out of his tree stand, and his phone is fried and doesn't work. 00:21:12 Speaker 2: So again these are all like I'm kind of falling in and out of understanding where I was. But I knew I had to get out because no one was really going to be looking for me for probably, like I said, I think it was three or three thirty people had my location. But so I start gathering my belongings and I'm roughly I call about three quarters of a mile down this bluff, and my truck's parked up, and I just start going up this hill and every ten to twenty feet I'm falling down and I'm just taking everything out of me to even walk. And I got to the point where i would pick like a rock or a tree, and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make it there, and I would get up and then I'd start passing out. And then about halfway up is when my whole left side started to not work. I felt my arm going limp, I was holding my bag, let go my bag, and my vision in my left side just started getting all blurry. And it was the same side where I hit my head, so that was really really scaring me. And then again the timeframe, like the minutes, the hours are still kind of fuzzy. I know it happened roughly around three I got to my truck, I want to say, around three fifty, right before four o'clock, and couldn't connect my phone. My phone still wasn't working, so I couldn't dial out or anything. So in my mind my plan was, I need to get somewhere where someone can find me. So my plan was to try to safely crash or pull off into a ditch. By seventy one and another like ten or so minutes that I don't really remember. I must have taken my boots off and my pants off, because when I ended up getting to the hospital later, I was in my gym shorts and a pair of like slides or something like cheap sneakers or something I had, and I think subconsciously I was making sure my feet were working because I knew I had to use the the gas and breaks in my truck. 00:23:05 Speaker 3: So I still. 00:23:06 Speaker 2: Don't really remember why I did that or what the reason was. But and then so I finally get in my truck, my phone's still not working, and it's trenchill downpour now, and I keep just getting like these adrenaline rushes of Okay, keep going, you can make it to the next road. You can make it to the next road. And then finally my phone connected to my truck, and I see my little wife's face out of my right eye on my recent call, so I just click it. 00:23:34 Speaker 1: John barely remembers this stuff, and much of it came to him days or even weeks later. It was like the lightning took his consciousness and he was fading in and out of it, trying to get back. Oddly. Terrell Spencer had a similar experience back in the chicken pasture. 00:23:55 Speaker 4: A lot of stuff happened, I think pretty fast. I knew I'd been hit by light and everything was white and I couldn't hear any like it was just like a reset. And when I came to, I was kind of looking over my body, and then there was like all the stuff that I believe about, like faith and meeting God and being judged. Like I can tell you I believe that more now, like cause I feel like I went through all that. You know, there's that whole side of it. But I'm looking down at my body in the rain, and there's smoke coming off of me. There's like this blue haze. I don't know if you ever like took like alcohol and put in your hand lit it, and it had that kind of like haze or hair spray, you know, when you're being just a knuckleheaded teenager or whatever. And there's just like that flame going over and it's like weird, like that was going up. It was like this blue kind of haze that with fire thing that was going up and down my body, and then there was smoke coming up, which I think it was probably just the water evaporating, and then it's kind kind of like I went back into my body and I don't know if I made that up that's what really happened, but that's that's what I experienced. And it was kind of the same like there's a couple of times in the war where stuff like that would happen and everything would slow down and you became hyper aware. I knew i'd been hit by lightning, Like I didn't see a lightning bolt or anything. I just it just kind of like went pink the explosion, and then I kind of came to and I heard, you know, hens make all kinds of your chickens make all kinds of sounds, you know, just like any farmer would know, like if you farm cattle or hogs or whatever. Like they talked to you and you can pick up on stuff. After twenty years, I've never heard chickens make the sound that they made then. It was the only way I can describe. It was like pure terror. 00:25:54 Speaker 1: Only a chicken farmer would get struck by lightning and described with such passion always as he heard his hen makes afterwards. But maybe that's why across the Creek Farms chicken is so good, and you too could partake in that chicken if you live in northwest Arkansas by ordering at www dot acrossthecreekfarm dot com. For real, you could order it from there. But chicken marketing is beside the point here. It's about to get real serious, like real serious back with Spence. 00:26:30 Speaker 4: So I came to and I like knew that I was dead and the war guys would get hit and like you have a certain amount of adrenaline something like all your insides will be messed up, but you can go for you know, five twenty thirty seconds. You like you got some time before you go. And so I was. I was in that timeframe, like I knew I was dead and I and the only thought I had was and I can hear these hens screaming and everything kind of like my senses came back. I couldn't move the right side of my body because that's where the lightning didn't hit me. Later on, like that, what we figured out is it it probably hit like six inches away or a foot away, but it hit in and it came in my right side and my muck boot it burned a hole through and then it went out my left side, and so there was a hole in my muck boot, you know, at the right below my toes where it came in, and then there was like on my left side it blew out skin and so there was like grass in my boot where it came in, and there was like a skin plug in a hole where it went out. Yeah, and I guess it missed my heart. Long story short, I lived. I don't and I'm not trying to spoiler alert, but and the only thing I could think of was, I don't know if you've ever seen like a dead animal out in the rain, Like I don't know if you kill a deer like we see, you know, if chicken gets out, something kills it, rains on just looks terrible. And for some reason, like my whole focus was I didn't want my wife or kids for that to be like how they found me, just wet and dead. So I got up and I stumbled over to the pen, and the hens are still screaming. My hearing's coming back, my vision's back. Like when I stood up, one side of my body kind of worked like it felt like when your feet go numb. The other side was just dead. And so like I kind of stumbled back into the pen. I opened up the door just because probably out of instinct, and around that door, you know, it's a twenty by forty structure, and around that door there was like an art a perfect circle of dead hens like going like ten foot back or whatever under the roosts. It's like any hen that had been in that kill zone was just dead. And then there were some like right outside of it that were like kind of like flopping around like kind of bobbing their head like they were stunned. And then they were all the ones on the roosts and on the back of the pen. They were all pile up there, just screaming their heads off. So I fell back down and I pulled out my phone, and my hands weren't my fingers weren't working, so it kind of felt like I was just clubbing my phone. It wanted to do that face id thing, you know, like and I don't know if it was like the smoke or what, but like I couldn't get it to go, So I'm like pawing out the pass code and I'm like, man, I'm on a clock here, so I'm trying, try and trying, and I finally get it to go through and it's one and it goes through to one of those dang telemarketers that's trying to sell you insurance and so like, and I can't remember if he answered or not, but I like, so I hung out and I'm like, you gotta be freaking kidding me. And so then I I'm able to hit you know, like call back Carla, my wife, and she's in a meeting, and she hits me with one of those like in a meeting, call or can't talk right now, call you back later. So then our church, the men in our church have like this group like a WhatsApp group, and I go to that one and I start doing all this text like trying to text it, and it's just absolute gibberish because my fingers don't work. 00:30:28 Speaker 1: From John and Spence's story, it's clear that if the lightning doesn't kill you, which in ninety percent of cases it doesn't, getting struck dysfunctionalizes you for a period of time. But now is a good time to try to understand why these guys got struck by lightning. Here's Josh from whether two two five. 00:30:50 Speaker 5: Now, the reason it strikes is it's looking for those charges, but it's looking for the shortest distance between the cloud base and where the item is on the surface. So that also kind of leads into, you know, the thought of tallest objects and stuff like that. Air is not a good conductor for electricity, so it looks for that shortest distance. And so when it's looking for that shortest distance, it's looking for the tallest object to strike to get to those particles on the surface that are charged. And when it does so, it typically hits the tallest things. In some cases, unfortunately for farmers in this part of the country, that may be a cow in you know, other parts of the world, that may be the tallest building or a light post or something that's just allowing for that shortest distance to make a connection. So the myth that I hear a lot too is you know, if you're wearing like a watch, or if you have a necklace, or if you're you know, carrying something metal with you, that you're automatically going to be the attraction to lightning. 00:31:52 Speaker 3: So it's actually kind of a wives tale. 00:31:54 Speaker 5: It really doesn't matter if it's more conductive or not. It really matters if you're the tallest thing out there. So if I were to go out in the parking lot and hold like a lead pipe above my head and a thunderstorm, I'm probably gonna get struck, not because of that pipe, but because I'm the tallest thing and that's the shortest distance, so it's going to hit that object. And the reason that there's a lot of people that they believe that metal is the attraction to lightning, it's because obviously we know that they hit metal structures the most. I've been text to a light pole that exploded from a lightning strike in my car, and you know that was the tallest thing out there, So it's really not you know one item. So if you have like a light pole, that's not going to be attracting the lightning more than let's say, if I were to put a wooden two by four out in the yard. So it's just it's mostly the height, and it's the connector between the shortest distance of the cloud based to the surface. 00:32:59 Speaker 1: Light strikes the highest thing around, not necessarily metal stuff. I would have got that wrong. On a test. Spence was in an open pasture standing beside that portable chicken hoop house which is probably seven eight ten feet tall. He didn't get a direct hit, but it probably struck the house. John was sitting in a white oak on the edge of a field opening, and that white oak was the biggest tree, he said, within about fifty yards. All that being said, I still wouldn't be holding something metal in a thunderstorm for crying out loud. Juju told us all not to do that. But maybe the science doesn't really back it up. But here is John and he's driving down the road, barely hanging on to consciousness, but he's managed to contact his wife and he hears her voice. 00:33:50 Speaker 2: And then hearing her voice really really helped, and then I I knew. I just had this like rush of energy where I knew I could make it to the hospital because if I pulled over and called an ambulance or she tried to get me, I felt like it was gonna be roughly around the same time as if I just pulled over and wait. Looking back, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do, but she's talking to me, and then her perspective of the story, she said, I wasn't making any sense. 00:34:17 Speaker 4: She said I was. 00:34:18 Speaker 2: She didn't know what happened. She just knew something was wrong from like the sound of my voice. And I get, you know, I get towards Greenland area, and that's when I felt like, Okay, I think I can make it, And she said I was making a little bit more sense. I could start, you know, piecing little pieces together. She was just she just kept repeating, keep talking, keep talking, keep talking. So at that point she was able to realize, okay, he's if something, if he stops talking, we can go get him help. So finally I get to the hospital and I remember her face when she saw my head, and she tried to like pose herself because she didn't want to freak me out more but then she knew it was really serious, and she gets me out of the truck getting to the hospital, and it was just I was just like a zombie, basically had no idea. I wasn't making sense. She was doing mostly talking for me, and then the people are just looking at me, like what happened? And then she said lightning. And that's when everybody just you know, you know, with trauma whatever. And they just brought me into a on a bed and hooked up so many machines. Again, I'm kind of fuzzy. I don't remember a lot of it. She know, she remembers more of that. And then I mean, I was I think my blood pressure was in the one nineties. I mean it was bad. I had no fluids in me. They had to hook me up to I sweated everything out of my system just trying to get off that mountain and then just all the energy it took to be able to get out. 00:35:52 Speaker 1: Let's see what happened to Spence. He's managed to get a garbled text message out to our men's church group thread. It's incoherent, but it mentions something about lightning. 00:36:05 Speaker 4: And this one guy named Dalton, he's like an aircraft guy somehow Dalton. He's like the Spence Whisper because he figures it out. He's like, guys, I think Spence needs help. He's hit by lightning instantly, they like mobilized. And I have a friend Zach Newcomb. He's like one of my oldest best friends. 00:36:24 Speaker 1: That Zach is my older brother Zach. 00:36:26 Speaker 4: And he was walking out the door on his way to Low's. So he says, I'm coming, and so I stand up and I start like quasi motoing it like crawling. So I'm like, I'll go, I'll go get over there to the gate. So I limp over the gate and I get there and I collapse. And here in a red Tacoma comes the hero of the hour, my friend Zach nukelemb and he whips in and I'm there and I'm so weak and nothing works and he pulls up. He thought I was dead, I mean from what he said. But he got there and he had to essentially pick me up and put me in his truck and then ran. And it was I've got a history with Zach. It was kind of all funny because like Zach helped me. He's a therapist too, and he helped me when I got back from the war from like being blown up a few times or being close to it, and so like I look at him and I'm kind of like bobbing around, and I'm like, Zach, I'm a tough sob are not. And then I like start laughing, and then I have like a flashback and I start crying, and then I'm like laughing, and I'm like, I think it's the war and it was like the perfect person, right, And so I'm like going on this roller coaster. We hit a traffic jam and I'm like, Zach, I think you're gonna have to ride. I don't go around the other side. They get me to the er and all that, and so i know I'm gonna be okay, but I'm like, my speeches were turning. I still can't very well on my right side. I think where the lightning came in, and we get to the er. 00:38:06 Speaker 1: Spence slowly regains the function of his body and voice. But what's interesting that I haven't told you is that when he got struck, there was not even a storm directly overhead. For real, there was not a lightning storm going on around him. There were just storms in the area and he still got struck, which is wild because it came completely without warning, which begs the question, how far away can lightning strike away from the storm. I know, just the weather analyst. I'm told he's a chief. 00:38:45 Speaker 5: I usually tell people be aware, even if you're up to twenty five even close to thirty miles away. Now, not every storm's going to do that. The tricky thing with storms is, you know, like you mentioned the eye of a storm, there's weird. 00:38:59 Speaker 3: Differentferences with some storms. 00:39:01 Speaker 5: In some cases, if you have an anvil cloud, you can get what's called an anvil crawler, and the lightning crawls up the anvil and then it shoots its way. 00:39:10 Speaker 3: Miles and miles. 00:39:11 Speaker 5: And typically some of the longer bolts that you get far out ahead of a storm, those are typically positive bolts, and they're typically on the edge of the thunderstorm. 00:39:22 Speaker 3: In some cases, those can actually go out. 00:39:24 Speaker 5: As far as twenty five plus miles from the actual storm itself, on the leading edge. And so, you know, typical thunderstorms they tell people around ten miles. But some of the more unstable environments, when you get some of that positive lightning as well, it can easily go fifteen twenty even upwards of close to thirty miles ahead of the storm. 00:39:49 Speaker 1: So mister weather two two five is telling me that you can be struck by lightning if you're within thirty miles of the storm. That is ridiculous and not even fair. But it even gets worse. As a matter of fact, the National Weather Service reports lightning traveling almost ninety miles ninety miles out of the anvil head of a thunderstorm near the Kennedy Space Center. They documented this, and for your notes, June, July, and August are the three highest months for lightning strikes. They peak in July, but Spence was hit in February and John was hitting September. I'd like to see what other wild lightning stories Josh has heard of. 00:40:37 Speaker 3: So there's a couple. 00:40:38 Speaker 5: One of the stats that I heard was in terms of lightning strikes to a human being in a lifetime, someone was struck seven times and that's the record to this day. So that's one because I just can't imagine going about life. And it sounded like, you know, the stat didn't give all the information, but it sounded like it was. At the same time, I don't know how anyone could just go on getting struck by lightning seven times that I would be terrified to go outside if that were the case. So yeah, there's that, And then there's always crazy stories too. Unfortunately, I hear this one a lot, but lightning leading to house fires. Other ones that I've seen too is it was, oh, it was like twenty fourteen there was a lightning strike. It was a very famous video a pickup truck that got struck and it actually blew up the concrete and it damaged the truck when it was driving through that lightning strike. I've seen some videos of lightning hitting cars and it can melt the dashboard type thing. So it's really weird because, you know, lightning, it's one of those phenomenons that we can kind of tell you it's gonna happen, but every experience is unique and weird. So you know, there's people that have experienced lightning and cars all have a different experience of you know, it struck the car and didn't do anything to it fully melted the dashboard type thing. 00:42:01 Speaker 1: There's the wives tell that if you get struck by lightning, then once you're more likely to be hit again. Could that be true? Roy Sullivan was a park ranger in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and he became known as the human lightning Rod after being struck seven times. Yep, he's the guy that Josh was talking about. There's a webpage that cites all the specific circumstances of his strikes, and they all seem like the outings of a normal outdoorsy guy, you know, one that worked outside. Once he was fishing, Once he was in a fire tower waiting out of storm. Once he was out in the woods and walking back to his truck while he was working, and he claimed that it felt like the storm was chasing him. Once his hair caught on fire after he got struck. All the strikes were documented by the Park Service. He died in nineteen eighty three at age seventy one, being struck seven times. He didn't die because of a lightning strike. But Spence has something to say about this idea of getting hit twice. These stories happened after a strike. 00:43:13 Speaker 4: It's interesting looking back, I had I was up in our haller, but this lightning bolt started up in the sky and in slow motion it was like coming for me, and then it just like wamn, it hit this ash tree, like a couple hundred yards away, and I remember like feeling like a little kid, like I got like I almost wept myself. But it's like I saw it coming and it just like went down. And then later in that summer, I had a storm. I'd finished up moving birds and I had a storm pop up, and I had lightning bolts hitting near and so they say like once you get. 00:43:46 Speaker 3: Hit after the fact, after the accidental. 00:43:48 Speaker 4: Yeah, I had two lightning strikes nearby, and I felt like there's that part in the office where Dwight sets it on fire and he throws fire crackers and they're like the fire shooting at us, and I feel like the lightning shooting at me, you know, like I just feel like it ads it out for me. So when I see a storm now, I'm just like nope, And if you don't want me around you, like it's just so. I don't know if there's truth to that, but they say you're more likely to get caught. 00:44:19 Speaker 1: Sounds to me like lightning is living rent free and Spence's head and probably John's two, and it would in mind if I got struck, But you just never know. I've got a question for Josh, is it possible there's more lightning today than ever before? 00:44:39 Speaker 5: So most of the research I'm looking at, they're accounting for you know, we've had lightning since the beginning of time, but obviously with more talk of more storm activity and hit everything along those lines. I mean, we've had several hurricanes in recent years that had an uptick in lightning and typically you didn't see that much lightning. 00:44:59 Speaker 3: Near the eyewall. 00:45:00 Speaker 5: Uh So there is a little a little talk going around with research that I'm reading and everything that says that there is a little bit of an increase in lightning over the last decade as we're getting more storm activity. And obviously for some of us here in the South, it may not feel like it because we get storms all the time, but you know, our atmosphere anywhere Gulf Coast areas all the way up into central United States, and we get more storms, we see more of it. But there is some research to indicate that there is an increase in lightning over the last decade or so. You're staying with a grin, You do the sound of hailstone's. 00:45:40 Speaker 4: Hit its in? 00:45:42 Speaker 1: Is that not batty? 00:45:47 Speaker 4: Hits me like an. 00:46:15 Speaker 1: If you're waiting for the sky to fall. It sounds like there's an uptick of lightning in the world, and that's good to know. That dang Turnpike song is one of my favorites. I'd now like to ask Josh if there are any other wives tells about lightning that he'd like to debunk. 00:46:34 Speaker 5: So obviously the metal one, that one has, you know, stuck with me just because obviously, I mean even today people talk about, you know, metal is going to lead to lightning, that type thing. You know, standing under a tree means you're going to be safe. That's not the case. If lightning strikes that tree, you're going to be you know, awfully close to that. Actually, I think one of the most one of the most interesting ones I hear is if someone is str by lightning, you cannot touch them. 00:47:02 Speaker 3: Because you're going to get electrocuted. That's a wives tale. 00:47:05 Speaker 5: It's perfectly safe to you know, assist them with medical treatment and stuff. It's not like you have to wait thirty minutes and then the charge goes away type deal. The other one too, once you stop hearing the thunder in the middle of a thunderstorm, it's absolutely over. We typically tell people to wait thirty minutes after you've heard that last lightning strike to make sure that. 00:47:24 Speaker 3: There's not going to be that one last bolt. 00:47:27 Speaker 4: Oh yeah. 00:47:27 Speaker 5: And then one of the ones that I hear is the debate of does lightning strike the same area? You know, there's a lot of people that they'll say it doesn't. There's a lot of people that say it does. Hate to break it to the people that say it doesn't strike twice. There's actually instances where lightning can strike the same area multiple times in a row. And I've actually seen videos where it can strike the same thing six times in a row. So lightning does strike twice, and it can actually happen more than twice in some locations. 00:47:58 Speaker 1: As it turns out, getting under a tree in a storm can be the worst thing that you can do, because that tree is gonna be the tallest thing around. Being shorter out in the open is better, even though that sounds completely ridiculous. And lying flat on the ground is a bad idea too, they say, or at least the Internet says, because it opens you up to a stronger charge if lightning hits near you, like more your body is touching the ground. But that's exactly what I did when I got caught before daylight in a bad thunderstorm while slipping up shoeless on a big old gobbler. I threw my gun and laid flat on the ground with lightning cracking all around me. I call that story the Lightning Bird, and ended up killing him after daylight after the storm passed. But basically, the best lightning advice you can get is to get the heck out of dodge and into a building or car as fast as possible, no matter what you've got to do. Josh said something earlier about the damage of all lightning strikes being unique, But what's also unique is how people respond to getting struck by lightning, which brings us back to where we started. Could lightning be used as a connector point to something bigger? Both Spence and John had unique things happened after the strikes. If you remember, the explosion caused Spence to flash back to war, but he actually thinks it might have helped him. 00:49:32 Speaker 4: I'd actually done a good job. I thought I'd put it all behind me, so it just kind of like getting the last little bit out, you know. It didn't like it didn't I didn't get hung up on it. It was just kind of interesting. 00:49:44 Speaker 2: It was still there, so you feel like it kind of purged some of that out. 00:49:48 Speaker 4: Stuff that I didn't know was in there, you know. I mean, I'd done a good job of working on it and putting it behind me, but yeah, I guess there was still a little bit left to come out. 00:49:57 Speaker 1: So here is an internet experienced that John had. 00:50:03 Speaker 2: I remember, like four or five days later, when things started to calm down, I was thinking, I'm like why I was having this like almost like a vision of a baby crying. And that's when I remembered when I woke up the first time I woke up getting shot out of stand I heard a baby crying, and that's when I started like open my eyes and realizing like, okay, what's going on? And I couldn't piece together why the baby was crying. And backstory, me and my wife, we've been trying to have a baby for the past you know, nine months before then and with no luck. And then two weeks after the accident, we found out we were pregnant. 00:50:41 Speaker 3: So that I thought was a. 00:50:42 Speaker 2: Really beautiful part of the whole story. How you know, through something that was traumatic and horrible, something beautiful kind of came out of it. 00:50:49 Speaker 1: But often in traumatic events, people remember more and more things about the second surrounding the event as time passes. Well, John was on the ground out in the woods. He remembers hearing a baby crying. It's pretty unique. But unfortunately he never got his bear, or he has it yet. Anyway, there's always next year. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease, for listening to Brent's This Country Life, and for listening to Lakes Backwoods University. Please share our podcast with a friend. If you know somebody that you think is prone to be struck by lightning, send this one to him. We really hope you enjoyed it, and as always, keep the wild places as wild because that's where the bears live.