Don't stand next to me in a cornfield

20 September 2005 @ early morning | Comments (3)

I’ve always been somewhat fascinated with weather (ahem), particularly violent weather. During the summer monsoon months, many times I have dropped my current task and driven east to simply sit amidst the daily display of enormous thunderheads that rise up from the deserts east of San Diego.

Given San Diego’s compact nature, it’s a 90-minute drive from the sands of the Pacific Ocean, through the Laguna Mountains, to the sands of Imperial Valley. I’ve literally been getting out of the water from surfing La Jolla in brilliant San Diego sunshine at noon and found myself in a surreal torrent of rain, lightning, and thunder by 1:30.

This all mainly stems from a lightning storm I experienced when I was 10. I was sitting near my open window watching the lightning approach, as the rain splattered against the screen (the window’s frame and adjustible awning were both made entirely out of aluminum). Suddenly, searing white light accompanied by a violent *KRRRRACKKKK* threw me across the room, against the back wall, and left me temporarily without vision or hearing (what’s strange is the thunder actually seemed to precede the lightning).

A lightning bolt had found the newly-planted Mulberry tree outside my window quite a nice place to ground itself. The charred remains were scattered below my window, some pieces still covered in small flames. The smell was strange, which I am told is ozone, but nevertheless I don’t think I’ve ever smelled it since, that is until last night.

A particularly violent storm cell passed directly over my house and I decided to try and capture some of the action with my new EX-Z750. While taking photographs from my living room window, looking out toward Mission Hills and Point Loma, I managed to catch a lightning bolt crack across the night sky.

Excited, and determined to get a better shot, I sat waiting next to the open window for the next chain of lightning (by the way, it’s really a pain in the ass to try and photograph lightning manually).

Strangely enough, the similarity to my childhood experience didn’t register untill after lightning struck the tree directly outside my window. It literally scared me into hitting the shutter at precisely the moment of the lightning strike (strengthening my theory that the sound precedes the actual bolt).

This is seriously a photo taken the moment the lightning struck the tree outside my window. My god, this thing looked and sounded like pure evil.

So next time you and I are together in a cornfield, you might want to take shelter next to a tree because I’m pretty sure the lightning’s coming for me, not you.