I have always been fascinated with lightning storms but Seattle, where I grew up, never had many. I looked forward to our summer trips to Pittsburgh because there was always at least a couple thunder storms when we visited. I remember watching my cousins huddled around their parents legs during storms, wondering what they were hiding from. I was mad the adults wouldn't let me stand outside, instead forced to experience the show from inside a house while looking through a window.
While in my early 20's, three friends and I were playing a round of golf at Jefferson Golf Course in Seattle. We were on the back nine when we saw a rare thunder storm form to the north east. We had a great view of it. Seeing a flash, we counted. One mongoose one, one mongoose two, one mongoose.... waiting to hear the thunder. By our reckoning lightning was dancing 8 to 15 miles in the distance, so we teed off.
Walking down the fairway, the hair on my legs and arms suddenly stood straight up. I wasn't the only one who felt it happening. We all looked at each other, seeing hair on everyones head looking like we had just stuck our fingers in a lamp socket. Even the air tasted different. Unlike anything experienced before. Weird.
(Seattle always looks like this. Lightning optional, fees apply. Photo is stolen from KOMO-TV web site who stole it from the University of Washington web site who probably stole it from an employee of either or from a student. Shit may hit the fan but so what? I ain't making a dime off this blog so let 'em all complain. Besides, I took communications law classes at the UW long before the internet existed and know I'm on shaky legal ground using the photo, but am risking it anyway with no principle in mind at all.)
We didn't get much time to wonder about the strange stuff going on before a blinding light flashed. Almost immediately the loudest sound you have ever heard deafened us all. We dove to the ground. Pure instinct. We could feel small objects hitting us while we covered our heads with our arms, golf bags and empty beer cans. At that moment we realized it was a lightning strike near by. It didn't take long to see how lucky we were. We spotted a tree, a mere hundred and fifty feet away, splintered into three large pieces. Broken branches and pieces of wood were scattered across the fairway.
Being that close to a lightning strike leaves an impression. I still enjoy watching lightning storms, even more since my close encounter. Like a dog that keeps checking out a porcupine after getting a snoot-full of quills. A veterinarian told me that once, while taking quills out of my dog's face. If a dog doesn't get quilled in their first encounter they will avoid porcupines. But get quilled once and a dog will keep going after a porcupine. When it comes to lightning storms, I'm a quilled dog. Always mindful of my fairway encounter, I prefer to watch a lightning storm from beneath safe shelter.
Tuesday afternoon there was a racket going on outside so I looked out the window. Small balls of hail were falling. Then a flash. And then another. And another. A lightning storm! Cool! I grabbed my microphone, recorder and headphones, hoping to capture the sound of thunder. News reports later announced that an inch of rain fell in thirty minutes, and a thousand lightning strikes had been measured during the storm that afternoon and evening.
I wouldn't doubt it. It rained like hell and I could see flashes often. As it turns out, I was fortunate to use the rig with the dead mongoose on it, the poor animal we accidentally ran over in Hawaii so we ate it and I use the skin to wrap around microphones to control wind buffeting sounds.
Outside our back door I adjusted the gain for the short shotgun mic to best capture thunderclaps heard three to eight miles away. Satisfied I was getting a decent recording, I slipped the headphones off my ears to listen naturally. The sound of thunder was rolling left to right, then right to left, then back again. Over and over. Damn! If I had grabbed my stereo mic instead I could be recording the sound as it moved around. What a sound stage that would be.
A bright flash took my mind off the stereo mic and how good dead mongoose meat tastes. Lightning had struck nearby. Probably less than a half mile away. I managed to say "one m..." before the sound hit. You can "see' the lightning below (click on it to see a larger image if you wish).
The lightest colored squiggly lines of the graph is what the sound of rain looks like. The darker sections with taller peaks is thunder from three to five miles away. The darkest part (at 51 seconds) is the thunder that was close by. Really close. There was too much gain for a sound so loud and close to the mic. You can see the first second and a half of the thunderclap is badly clipped. But by listening it becomes abundantly clear that nature has one hell of a reverb plug-in at its fingertips for use.
A recording of the thunder is below (1:12 minute long). Don't know about you, but the sound heard sparks my curiosity of lightning storms even more. Acid rock bands got nothin' on a good thunderclap.