Thunderstruck

I’ve written about my maternal grandfather here many times before. A year or so ago I learned something surprising about him: he was terrified of thunderstorms.

The house he raised my mom and her siblings in and in which I spent many happy days of my childhood sat on a hilltop. Three enormous oaks stood around the driveway. One by one over the years the lightning took them. One I can only remember as a stump, right from the beginning of my own awareness. Another I remember faintly, as both a living tree and as a shattered obstacle and tangle of limbs to be removed. The last, in which he hung a rope swing for us, lasted until I was an adult, but now it too is gone.

Maybe that had something to do with it—living in a lightning rod. It occurred to me recently that he also used the very top of the hill as a scrapyard for his plumbing-electric business. Coils of copper wire and stacks of copper pipe lay there, inviting the storm.

What most surprised me about this fear was his response. Apparently when my mom and her siblings were kids, if a thunderstorm rolled in over the northeast Georgia mountains he would load the entire family into the car and drive around until it had dissipated. He didn’t want simply to get away from the house, but to keep moving and stay busy during the entire storm.

“I don’t know what happened to him to make him like that,” my mom has said.

This is the man who inspired the grandfather in Griswoldville, who worked for decades in a business that exposed him to electrocution and sewage and crooked contractors, who told me stories about watching the flash of artillery over the next ridge in Korea, who grew up in poverty with no indoor plumbing. Imagining him frightened, and so frightened that he chose flight, was a revelation. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially when my turn now comes for thunderstorms to roll in over the South Carolina upstate. I may not react the way he did, but I understand the fear.

A curious change: as a kid I didn’t mind the thunder. When I was small we replaced our shingle roof with metal and I learned to love the sound of rain on it. (If I could find a white noise app that combined heavy rain on a metal roof and the rushing mountain creek about fifty feet from my bedroom window, and if the storm could gradually fade into the sounds of crickets and tree frogs, I’d never struggle to sleep again.) The occasional thunder was rarely sharp or loud enough to be frightening, and when it was my parents taught me to regard it as a demonstration of God’s power. Look at what his creation can do! As a result, for many years I saw thunder as just that—a novelty if not an inconvenience, an instructive change in the weather that usually passed quickly.

But somewhere in the last few years my granddad’s terror has sprouted up in me. It’s not fear, precisely, but a gnawing worry. I can feel it in my chest. When the sky dims and clouds—as it did earlier this week, as it is today, as I write this—something clenches and won’t release, not until the storm is over. Until then, I fret over wind and leaks (our roof hasn’t leaked once and there is no sign that it will) and tornadoes (a real but much more remote threat).

Frontline troops in the First World War sometimes described waiting out a barrage in terms like “weathering a storm.” The strain broke some men. Passive sitting, waiting for destruction that may or may not come, confronts one with smallness and a total lack of control. Waiting out a thunderstorm is usually not nearly as serious, but that feeling is recognizable. Better, since one has the option unlike the men on the Western Front, to do something—even just drive around—than sit still and take it.

What happened to my granddad to give him that fear? Maybe something as a kid, which is what the question suggests. Then again, people aren’t that simple, so maybe nothing. But if this was not a lifelong fear, as in my case, where it’s only cropped up in the last several years, I suspect responsibility played a role. As a kid I enjoyed the thunder because of the blessing of being taken care of, rather than taking care of others. I only fret about these things now because of the good things in life—a house, my wife, our kids. I don’t want to worry away my forties and the kids’ childhoods in fear.

I have to wonder whether my granddad’s destinationless thunderstorm car rides stopped once my mom and aunt and uncle were older. I remember my granddad as unflappable. He was a man of integrity and duty and I wish I could ask whether he learned to take captive his fear and, if so, how.

Perhaps someday, when it will all seem so eternally distant that we can both laugh about it. Until then, with each storm and downpour, I pray to think of blessing rather than danger, and to control my worry, actively and purposefully, with love.