I was struck by lightning yesterday—and boy am I sore
Ars technical director: "I, I, I... think we need to call 911."
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Around Memorial Day weekend four years ago, Ars Technical Director Jason Marlin was simply minding his own business in a new home office, enjoying Carolina thunderstorms after recently moving to Asheville, North Carolina. He'll never forget what happened next. Since our pals at Mosaic recently dug deep into the aftermath of lightning strikes, we thought we'd share Jason's first-person account once more. This story from our archives first ran in May 2013.
"Sir, look at me—did you have any shoes on?" asked the emergency medical tech. "Were you wearing shoes when you were struck?"
"Huh?" I wondered, a little dazed. "What's with the shoe obsession?"
Let me back up. My family and I moved from Chicago to Asheville, North Carolina last autumn, ostensibly to get closer to nature. Mostly, this has been great. We still have an urban center we can walk to, but the woodland behind my house hosts all manner of flora and fauna. We've traded rat-infested dumpsters for trash bins overturned by bears; instead of skyscrapers, we now have mountains. Unfortunately, mountains don't have lightning rods.
Yesterday, I was sitting in my studio office—basically a converted garage—while a thunderstorm brewed outside. After wrapping up a conference call with some of Ars' finest, I was getting ready to dive back into work when the storm really picked up. "Ahhhh," I thought as I leaned back in my chair to stare out at the strange greenish light against a purple-clouded backdrop. "So beautiful!"
At that moment—and this part is a little foggy—a bright arc of electricity shot through the window and directly into my chest. I'm not sure whether the arc originated from the sky or the ground, but it knocked me out of my chair. I hit the concrete floor and bounced back up to my feet, which were shuffling at top speed into a bookshelf. I remember thinking, "OK, going to die now. Do not fall down. Do not pass out."
I've read that being struck by lightning is akin to a being hit by a huge defibrillator. I'm not sure about that—but it did feel magnitudes worse than the time I touched an electric fence as a kid.
I stumbled out of the studio and toward the house where my wife and children were staring out at me in horror. They had seen the flash and heard the tremendous crack that comes with a nearby lightning strike. My son Felix said the flash was so bright that he thought it had gone through the kitchen. As I staggered into the house looking like a wide-eyed psychopath, everyone knew something had happened. "I, I, I... think we need to call 911!" I stuttered.
At this point, I still couldn't sit down, so I paced the house like a coked-out fratboy, clutching my heart while my wife Kris spoke with 911. "I'm sorry, did you ask if he had shoes on?" she said, then directed the question to me. It turns out there's something of an obsession with shoes and lightning, the predominant belief being that rubber soles offer some insulating protection against the current. But as Kyle Hill writes in a blog post, "If lightning has burned its way through a mile or more of air (which is a superb insulator), it is hardly logical to believe that a few millimeters of any insulating material will be protective... I tend to believe that there would be little effect from whatever is on the bottom of your feet."
By the time EMTs arrived in a siren-wailing ambulance (to the significant delight of my two-year-old), I was feeling much better. Still soaked in adrenaline, I felt no pain. The EMTs took my vitals and urged me to go to the hospital for testing. I declined, promising to call my doctor if anything weird started to happen. I mean, my grandmother was struck by lightning twice—how bad can it be? I didn't have any burn marks, nor did I end up with a badass Lichtenburg scar. I was like a pirate with no peg leg or eyepatch.
I spent the rest of the day in a state of foggy confusion and realized that I may have developed a bona fide new phobia. As more thunderstorms rolled into the area last night, I gathered groggy children to the center-most area of the house and created a makeshift pillow raft to sleep on. I even woke a sleeping toddler; only a madman does this.
Neighbors blocks away later told my wife they heard the enormous boom and knew it was very close. "That would be my husband," she replied.
To describe the experience as surreal is an understatement. I'm not sure how things worked out the way they did. I was on a concrete floor surrounded by electronics, which was something like a worst-case scenario. Remarkably, even the laptop and monitors just a few feet away from me survived.
Today, my whole body is sore—even my organs ache in a hard-to-describe way—but I feel lucky to have walked away unscathed. There's a fine line between awe and terror. I have now been inextricably nudged to the right of it.
And no... I was not wearing shoes.
