MARY

LIGHTNING LUKENS

Chuck Bolsinger

For about two and a half years I walked past the Lukens farm every day on my way to school, and if there was even a hint of a thunderstorm, common in eastern Kansas, I ran. Lukens's farm was said to be a "lightning magnet." There was plenty of supporting evidence: an Austrian pine by the house with multiple scars spiraling from the top to the ground; a row of Osage orange trees with burned-out gaps; a hay barn reduced to a pile of charred lumber; a splintered telephone pole at the end of the driveway; the house itself a patchwork of repairs; and Lukens's own claim of replacing electrical appliances fried by lightning three times in seven years, despite lightning rods he insisted were "state-of-the-art."
    Some people believed Fred Lukens himself was the lightning magnet, with an invisible protective shield, noting that he'd been in the barn and house when they were struck, and near most of the other strikes when they occurred, and came out unscathed. Then there was a story that when Fred was a kid, lightning struck an outhouse he was in. He ran out of the burning two-holer terrified but unhurt. And a year or two later a lightning bolt killed seven cows he was driving into a loading pen, without injuring him. Even if true, this wasn't, in my judgment, proof of Fred Lukens's so-called lightning magnetism-with-immunity. The topic came up in my sophomore science class while we were studying electricity, and the instructor, a local Potawatami with three fingers of his left hand missing (he said he lost them while working at a Detroit automobile factory), took a poll: How many of us, with our newly acquired understanding of electricity, believed it possible that Mr. Lukens actually attracted lightning, but was somehow invulnerable? Skeptics, including me, outnumbered believers, though I distinctly recall that the instructor remained noncommittal. Then, during spring of my junior year in high school, Fred Lukens was knocked off his tractor by lightning and walked away. This jolted me, and most doubters, into questioning our skepticism. Some wondered if Lukens, by gift or accident, did possess inordinate powers, and half-joking, half-in-seriousness, gave him names like Thunderbolt Fred and Lightning Lukens.
    Fred's lightning escapades made him a local luminary of sorts, though he refused to discuss the topic or allow newspaper reporters to photograph him, which only charged up his mystique. About all he was known to say about the tractor incident was what he told the Methodist Pastor the first Sunday afterward: "God got my attention that time." The implication that God had a bone to pick with Fred generated high voltage speculation about what he'd done, or was still doing, to get on The Big Guy's radar. Neighbors watched for some patent change of habit, a confession of secret sins, large offerings to the church, lavish gifts to his wife, but nothing of the sort happened.
    Despite Fred's reticence, a detailed account of the event spread with lightning speed, for the simple reason that Fred's wife, Edna, witnessed the whole thing, almost. Unlike Fred, a man of few words, Edna was a marathon talker but, according to my grandmother (I was raised by my grandparents), she had a heart of gold and was never known to gossip, brag, or give anyone reason to envy or resent her or doubt her word. Edna told the story of Fred's direct encounter with lightning to my aunt Marian, who told my grandmother, who told me. Here is Edna's story, in her words, more or less, with some possible distortion from the retelling, and memory lapses:

"Each year about 400 people are struck by lightning in the US; eighty percent live."

I was doing the dishes and looking out the window and could see Fred in the field, pulling the three-bottom plow with his Allis Chalmers, which, with its steel tires and size, is better in that heavy clay than our little John Deere. It was looking like rain, and I was about to go out and make sure the car windows were rolled up, when KABLAM! there was a blinding flash and thunder all at the same time. Here we go again, I thought, soon's I got over being stunned, and Hotshot started yelping like he always does when lightning strikes, and then I looked out the window and saw Fred on the ground and the tractor still going across the field, heading for the crick. I ran out of the house and across the field and Hotshot came a-running and got to Fred first and started licking his face, and of course as you know now Fred wasn't dead at all. He pushed the dog away and got up on all fours, looking confused-who wouldn't be?-and then he saw me and yelled, "Stop the blankety-blank tractor 'fore it goes in the crick." I ran and ran and caught up with the tractor and managed to get on, wondering how Fred got knocked off without getting plowed under, but glad he wasn't, and then I couldn't figure out how to shut it off, 'cause Fred never let me drive the Allis Chalmers, not that I wanted to, I'll take the John Deere to that ugly dinosaur any day, thank you. Finally I figured out where the gas feed lever was and I pulled it down to zero and the tractor chugged to a stop, then I jumped off and ran back to Fred, who was standing up, his shirt half-ripped off, probably from falling off the tractor, and his cap nowhere in sight, maybe plowed under, and his hair sticking up in all directions like that cartoon cat with his tail in the light socket. Then it started raining and we high-tailed it to the house amidst more flashing, cracking, and booming. Fred seemed O.K. though he complained of a ringing in his ears, and he either had a short-term memory loss or the lightning charged up his appetite, 'cause we hadn't been in the house five minutes before he said, "When's breakfast?" which we'd already eaten

That thunderstorm, according to the NASA Weather Website, was one of about 2,000 that occurred worldwide at that instant. Collectively, there are about 100 flashes per second, or about 3.2 billion flashes per year, of which fewer than twenty percent strike the ground. Like Fred, people through the ages have connected the awesome power of lightning with God. Greeks believed Zeus, supreme god, threw lightning bolts from heaven to show anger. The Vikings' Thor produced lightning by striking an anvil with a hammer while riding his chariot through the sky. Early statues of Buddha show him carrying thunderbolts with arrows at each end. Some Native Americans believed lightning was created by the flapping wings of the mystical Thunderbird (which wasn't denied by my science teacher).
    Lightning has been the object of scientific research since the eighteenth century, beginning with experiments by T. F. D'Alibard of France, G. W. Richmann of Sweden, and, of course, Benjamin Franklin. In 1927, C. T. R. Wilson won the Nobel Prize for physics for advancing lightning research with his invention, the Cloud Chamber. Now, rockets, high-altitude airplanes, and spacecraft, along with ground-based systems are used to study lightning. The National Lightning Detection Network in Tucson, Arizona, processes data from sensors across the country to create real-time lightning-strike maps. Kansas is a "hot spot," though Florida gets the most strikes (Tampa Bay's NHL team, 2004 winner of the Stanley Cup, is appropriately named "Lightning").
    Each year about 400 people are struck by lightning in the US; eighty percent live. Your chance of being struck is 1-in-700,000, considerably better than winning the lottery. Avoiding open fields, golf courses, boats, lone trees, etc. during thunderstorms, will improve your odds with lightning. (My abstinence from the lottery improves my chance of not losing; your odds if you play, like EPA gas-mileage averages, may vary.)
    Lightning-prone areas abound (New York City's Empire State Building has been struck many times), but of "lightning-prone humans," I find nothing in the literature. I always assumed that the Lukens farm, not Fred Lukens, was lightning-prone, though why I couldn't say, and that Fred was just incredibly lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you look at it.
    Last year I went to my high school reunion, the only one I've attended, and found that while in three decades many people I knew in eastern Kansas had changed so much I didn't recognize them, and the little farming town that bustled when I was kid was on its way to becoming prairie again, changes in the countryside were few and subtle. There were fewer upland fields of planted crops and more grassland, less wheat and more soybeans, and more large round hay bales and fewer of the small rectangular ones. I was surprised to see deer-crossing signs. When I was a kid, deer were unheard of in that area. But the rolling, windy plains, broken by limestone bluffs and winding bands of riparian forests of hackberry, oak, cottonwood, ash, and elm looked much as I remembered them (even with scattered snags created by Dutch elm disease). I had no trouble finding my way out to the old family farm and was surprised—sort of gratified, but I'm not sure why—to find the road as rough and full of ruts as ever. And the last mile had never been graveled, I realized, when my rental car started fish-tailing in the mud. As it happened, I was there during a Kansas thunderstorm, which was letting up as I passed the old Lukens farm. Fred had passed on years before, I'd heard, and Edna was in a nursing home. The house they had lived in was gone, replaced by a fancy, two-story house that had apparently been there several years. The Austrian pine was still there, looking quite healthy, and a new barn with a green metal roof stood about where the old hay barn had been. The name on the mailbox, like the one at my old family farm, was one I didn't recall, so I didn't stop. I did notice as I drove slowly by that neither the house nor the barn had lightning rods. Now that Fred was gone, was lightning avoiding the place? Suddenly jagged lightning cut the blue-black clouds beyond the barn, and a sharp crack of thunder followed a split-second later. Maybe not, I thought, as I picked up speed and got on down the road.