Vic Socotra

08 June 2008

Heat Lightning

When the flashes come in the sky and there is no sound to go with them, we used to shrug and call it “heat lightning.” Growing up in Michigan, the thunderstorms would roll in from the Big Lakes, and it was not uncommon to have the night sky light up, silent as the winter aurora.

There is no such thing, of course. Somewhere the great chasms of electric fire are filled with supersonic air crashing together. It is just far enough away that the slower-moving sound waves are attenuated and are lost in the race with the speed of light.

Heat lightning to the west and south can be a critical indicator of impending trouble, since with the prevailing weather patterns it means that energy is approaching us and already past critical mass, fiery bolts connecting earth and heaven.

I was contemplating a remarkable discharge of electrical energy in the sky to the west and south. The thunderheads were concealed behind the west tower, which was lit each second or so like the crenellated battlements of an ancient castle. There was noise at first, enough to entice those who feared a repeat of the barrage that cast a hundred thousand of us into darkness early in the week.

Big Pink was fortunate. Power came back to the circuit that powers the refrigerators within half a day, and the groceries did not turn sickly-sweet with rot.

The booming began to die away, though the lightning actually began to intensify, flickering in strobe waves over the castle. When I lived in Florida, heat lightning is often seen out over the water at night, the remnants of storms that formed during the day along a sea breeze front coming in from the Gulf.

Pensacola was a fine place to watch the storms, and so was Tampa, the Thunder capital of the South. The unobstructed view from the Bachelor Quarters out over Tampa Bay in the late afternoon was a carnival of lightning and sound.

They say that the sound of the thunder rarely travels more than ten miles. I don’t know about that. The handy rule of thumb I learned as a kid is useful, which is one of the two formulae that are worth teaching in grade school: one potato, one beat of the heart, for each mile of separation from the violence.

Boom! Ten potatoes, the lighting is striking Fairfax, or Prince William County. Five potatoes it is Falls Church or Alexandria, and in the darkness there were darker spots that could have been ominous triangles in the sky.

Maybe it was just the residual willies from having a tornado on the ground this week just to the west, and the wholesale disruption of the power gird. So long as potatoes connected the light and the sound there was danger.

Under optimum conditions, intense electrical displays can be seen far beyond the curve of the earth. Even a big ship goes masthead-down at twenty miles at sea. Lightning erupting from the bowels of a thunderhead can be seen for more than a hundred miles.

Height of the anvil in the cloud also accounts that no number of potatoes can account for- it could be 45,000 feet for a storm in the temperate latitudes towering above the highest-flying commercial jet. It could be lower, of course, but as much as the current record of 78,000 feet, where only the Blackbird flew and the pilots could log time against their astronauts wings.

I was happy enough to count potatoes from my platform connected to earth over the pool. When there finally was no longer a connection between light and sound, and it was nearly certain that no trees would try to fly, I wrapped it up and went to bed.

It is the little things that count in life, the small comforts that separate us from misery. With only flickering light in the night sky, I was serene that the air conditioning would be on all night.

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