Field Notes—

Lightning, Thunder, And The Sleeping Dog

By Curtiss Clark

…Then it poured, a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

Writing this good makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Ted Kooser, the poet who drew this scene from his memory and his mastery of language in a poem about his mother, lives in Nebraska, where electrical storms truly are shaggy beasts stalking the prairie. By comparison, New England is a port in the storm.

New England is the only region on the East Coast that has an offshore cold water current, and the cool sea breeze tempers the muggy summer stew that so quickly creates thunderstorms in other parts of the country. The coastal zone of New England has fewer thunderstorms than anywhere else east of the Rocky Mountains. In an average year, the number of thunderstorm days in New England is 20 or fewer, according to New England Weather, New England Climate, by climatologists Gregory Zielinski and Barry Keim. Pennsylvania, they point out, has 30 to 40 thunderstorm days each year, and Florida, with up to 100 per year, is the thunderstorm capital of the lower 48.

Even still, for our dog, Boon, there are far too many thunderstorms dragging their bellies across our little hill. A few months ago, I wrote about Boon’s umwelt, or surrounding sensory world, wherein hound sensitivities far beyond my understanding shape his everyday experience into something I will never know or comprehend. His perception of thunderstorms is something I am glad I don’t have to experience. He is a most courageous dog when it comes to facing down a turning high-tailed skunk, or chomping wasps and bees midair, or stealing lunches from the cluttered vans of $50-an-hour tradesmen. But the most distant rumble of thunder sends him scrabbling under the bed, where he remains peering out at concerned humans with the desperate look of the condemned.

Somehow, that small racing canine heart under the bed is tightly bound to events eight miles up in the tops of thunderheads. On these hot, muggy July days, air at the earth’s surface rises, and water vapor condenses in the clouds, releasing even more latent heat, accelerating the upward lift in an unstable atmosphere, reaching altitudes where the temperature drops to below the freezing point. The liquid carried aloft freezes, and ice and dust particles collide freely, creating immense static electrical fields with a negative charge high in the thunderhead. This imbalance between the negative charge of in the top of the cloud and the positive charge of the earth, or lower clouds, reaches its violent reconciliation through the arcing agency of lightning, which is so efficient in its purpose that it gets the job done in a split second. That is fast enough for a bolt of 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the surface of the sun, to leave only the slightest char on a tree.

From the perspective under the bed, the impressive performance of lightning, with its attendant thunderous applause, hardly seems like a balancing act; the world is so out of kilter to Boon that even a pork chop passed before his nose loses all its powers of attraction. So when my mother gave me a clipped newspaper ad about the Thundershirt, a dog garment purported to neutralize the charge of fear built up by thunderstorms in its wearer, I laughed. My hound’s sartorial repertoire is limited to a collar, a license, and occasionally scat when he can find it. A shirt, even a Thundershirt, seemed out of the question. And the claims about altering canine psychology during a storm seemed patently bogus. But there was a money-back guarantee…

Fast forward to the next big storm. Boon lies on the couch in his new Thundershirt, not whining and whimpering, but snoring. Go figure. Swaddled in this way, his nervous system has found its own equilibrium. Cloaked now with the full powers of Morpheus against the raging storm, he has become Thunderdog! — able to leap tall thunderheads with a single nap.

I don’t pretend to understand all the mysteries locked inside thunderstorms and sleeping dogs, nor do I want to. Like an unexpected turn of phrase, the unexpected expression of natural forces sometimes makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. This little electrical charge keeps me a slightly off balance and falling forward into the next incredible thing.

(More than 80 other essays in Curtiss Clark’s Field Notes series can be found at www.field-notebook.com)