Good recent Walrus.

I continue to be baffled by why the strike that hit my tent was so glancing. Was it side splash, the point coming to ground somewhere nearby, leaping a fallen log or tag alder and hitting my tent somewhat tired out? Or was it the speed of the bolt that spared me, current zooming through the poles at 220,000 kilometres an hour? But if lightning’s temperature is thousands of degrees, why didn’t my tent simply vaporize?

I’ll never know. What was plain in that particular storm, in that particular place, is that my aluminum poles acted similar to a Faraday cage around me and took the heat. Another time, who knows?

The more we learn, the more capricious and imponderable lightning becomes. It’s the wild card, familiar but eternally a wonder. How many imponderables do we have left? We have so mastered, so paved over this world, but there is still something ungovernable we must live with, a supremely random force of nature, quite outside ourselves.

It is not just a direct hit that is worrisome. Through its charge, lightning can harm any creature within a fifty-metre radius of the strike point. We can also be harmed collaterally, by getting knocked off our feet by the percussive force or walloped by a struck tree. We cannot outrun it — lightning comes to earth at an estimated 220,000 kilometres an hour — and we cannot dress for it, as a bolt reaches temperatures of 28,000 degrees. We can only hide.