FROM ISSUE #58: THE WEATHER
AMARIS FELAND KETCHAM is the author of A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains, Glitches in the FBI, and Best Tent Camping: New Mexico. She is an Adobe Master Teacher and teaches interdisciplinary liberal arts at the University of New Mexico Honors College.
1. All of my patients had been struck by lightning. The summer between high school and college, I worked as a physical therapy technician at a family practice in Eminence, Kentucky. The town was small and strange. In my memory, it hailed every afternoon that summer. Even though I knew correlation does not equal causation, I could not help but conjoin two there-universal facts: not only had my patients all been struck by lightning, but they were all ambidextrous.
According to the National Safety Council, the odds of dying by lightning strike are 1 in 164,968. Not all strikes are fatal, of course, and many people survive being hit. Even though a lightning bolt can reach 50,000°F, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun, it might not fry you. In any given year in the United States, your estimated odds of being struck by a brilliant, electrical discharge are less than one in a million. The odds of a lightning strike hitting you in your lifetime are one in 12,000.
Of course, the chances that you’ll be struck by lightning are probably higher if you partake in risky behavior: strolling through an open horse pasture while it’s raining, adjusting the direction of an antenna during a windstorm, or living in Eminence, population 2,240.
Maybe all forty of my patients hadn’t been
