A Match to the Heart
Page 1
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
PENGUIN BOOKS A MATCH TO THE HEART
Gretel Ehrlich is the author of The Solace of Open Spaces, the novel Heart Mountain, and a collection of essays, Islands, the Universe, and Home.
Praise for A Match to the Heart
“Harrowing, amusing, unforgettably vivid ... Ehrlich is a compulsive connector of the physical to the mystical.... Her contemplation of storms-their anatomy, behavior and power—is gripping, as she ponders the scale of what befell her.” -Chicago Tribune
“A Match to the Heart is opulent stuff ... wonderfully evocative. ... [Ehrlich] writes movingly of ... the world with the vision of a mystic and the ecological consciousness of a naturalist.”
—New York Newsday
“A Match to the Heart is in many ways the ultimate study of humans and nature, when what’s outside suddenly forces its way inside.”
-The Sunday Oregonian
“Like the title suggests, [Ehrlich] holds up a light to illuminate her own condition. The Buddhist in her gives us a thoughtful meditation on the state of suspension between life and death. The reporter in her shines a light on the science, myth and medicine of lightning.”
—Rocky Mountain News
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
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Rosebank,Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
Copyright © Gretel Ehrlich, 1994
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission
to reprint previously published material:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from “The Birth
place” from Station Island by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1985 by Seamus Heaney.
Rights outside the U.S. administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted
by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
Inc. and Faber and Faber Limited.
New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “Letter of Testimony”
from A Tree Within by Octavio Paz, copyright © 1988 by Octavio Paz.
.
eISBN : 978-0-140-17937-8
1. Ehrlich, Gretel-Health. 2. Electrical injuries—Patients—Biography
3. Lightning-Health aspects-Casc studies. I. Title.
RD96.5.E37 1994
617.1-22—dc20
[B]
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank all those who gave help, care, and friendship in a time of need. Heartfelt thanks to my parents, Grant and Gretchen Ehrlich, who saved me, cared for me, and gave moral support and new friendship in our late years; to Dr. Blaine Braniff, healer, teacher, and companion extraordinaire; to Dick and Dorothy Roberts for making their plane available; to the doctors and nurses at Santa Barbara Cardiovascular Group; to the nurses in the Coronary Care Unit at Cottage Hospital; to Dr. Mary Cooper whose medical literature on lightning injury has helped us all; to Dr. Rick Westerman, thoracic surgeon, who let me watch; and to all those at the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock conference who told me their stories. Thanks to friends, old and new, whose cheer brightened long nights and days, especially Sue Davies and David Buckland; Patrick Markey, Bob Redford, Theresa Curtain, and Carol Fontana; Tamara Asseyev, Noel and Judy Young, Hillary Hauser and Jim Marshall, Kate and Clyde Packer, Jim Cresson, Marshall and Heidi Rose, Laurel Miller, Aaron Young, Pico Iyer, and Michael Ross; to Naomi Seeger for help with medical research; to my agent, Liz Darhansof f ; to my various editors and publishers: Michael Jacobs, Al Silverman, Paul Slovak, and my editor, Dan Frank; and, last but not least, my canine friends and guides, Rusty, French Fry, Yaki, and, especially, Sam.
Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?
We come back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:
birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth
like unstacked iron weights
afloat among galaxies.
-Seamus Heaney
... a witch who escapes human
detection will nevertheless
eventually be struck down by
lightning.
-Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft (1944)
chapter 1
Deep in an ocean. I am suspended motionless. The water is gray. That’s all there is, and before that? My arms are held out straight, cruciate, my head and legs hang limp. Nothing moves. Brown kelp lies flat in mud and fish are buried in liquid clouds of dust. There are no shadows or sounds. Should there be? I don’t know if I am alive, but if not, how do I know I am dead? My body is leaden, heavier than gravity. Gravity is done with me. No more sinking and rising or bobbing in currents. There is a terrible feeling of oppression with no oppressor. I try to lodge my mind against some boundary, some reference point, but the continent of the body dissolves ...
A single heartbeat stirs gray water. Blue trickles in, just a tiny stream. Then a long silence.
Another heartbeat. This one is louder, as if amplified. Sound takes a shape: it is a snowplow moving grayness aside like a heavy snowdrift. I can’t tell if I’m moving, but more blue water flows in. Seaweed begins to undulate, then a whole kelp forest rises from the ocean floor. A fish swims past and looks at me. Another heartbeat drives through dead water, and another, until I am surrounded by blue.
Sun shines above all this. There is no pattern to the way its glint comes free and falls in long knives of light. My two beloved dogs appear. They flank me like tiny rockets, their fur pressed against my ribs. A leather harness holds us all together. The do
gs climb toward light, pulling me upward at a slant from the sea.
I have been struck by lightning and I am alive.
chapter 2
Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground, before “streamers” jumped the positive charge back up from ground to cloud, before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking.
When I started out on foot that August afternoon, the thunderstorm was blowing in fast. On the face of the mountain, a mile ahead, hard westerly gusts and sudden updrafts collided, pulling black clouds apart. Yet the storm looked harmless. When a distant thunderclap scared the dogs, I called them to my side and rubbed their ears: “Don’t worry, you’re okay as long as you’re with me.”
I woke in a pool of blood, lying on my stomach some distance from where I should have been, flung at an odd angle to one side of the dirt path. The whole sky had grown dark. Was it evening, and if so, which one? How many minutes or hours had elapsed since I lost consciousness, and where were the dogs? I tried to call out to them but my voice didn’t work. The muscles in my throat were paralyzed and I couldn’t swallow. Were the dogs dead? Everything was terribly wrong: I had trouble seeing, talking, breathing, and I couldn’t move my legs or right arm. Nothing remained in my memory—no sounds, flashes, smells, no warnings of any kind. Had I been shot in the back? Had I suf fered a stroke or heart attack? These thoughts were dark pools in sand.
The sky was black. Was this a storm in the middle of the day or was it night with a storm traveling through? When thunder exploded over me, I knew I had been hit by lightning.
The pain in my chest intensified and every’muscle in my body ached. I was quite sure I was dying. What was it one should do or think or know? I tried to recall the Buddhist instruction regarding dying—which position to lie in, which direction to face. Did the “Lion’s position” taken by the Buddha mean lying on the left or the right? And which sutra to sing? Oh yes, the Heart Sutra ... gate, gate, paragate ... form and formlessness. Paradox and cosmic jokes. Surviving after trying to die “properly” would be truly funny, but the chances of that seemed slim.
Other words drifted in: how the “gateless barrier” was the gate through which one passes to reach enlightenment. Yet if there was no gate, how did one pass through? Above me, high on the hill, was the gate on the ranch that lead nowhere, a gate I had mused about often. Now its presence made me smile. Even when I thought I had no aspirations for enlightenment, too much effort in that direction was being expended. How could I learn to slide, yet remain aware?
To be struck by lightning: what a way to get enlightened. That would be the joke if I survived. It seemed important to remember jokes. My thinking did not seem connected to the inert body that was in such terrible pain. Sweep the mind of weeds, I kept telling myself-that’s what years of Buddhist practice had taught me.... But where were the dogs, the two precious ones I had watched being born and had raised in such intimacy and trust? I wanted them with me. I wanted them to save me again.
It started to rain. Every time a drop hit bare skin there was an-explosion of pain. Blood crusted my left eye. I touched my good hand to my heart, which was beating wildly, erratically. My chest was numb, as if it had been sprayed with novocaine. No feeling of peace filled me. Death was a bleakness, a grayness about which it was impossible to be curious or relieved. I loved those dogs and hoped they weren’t badly hurt. If I didn’t die soon, how many days would pass before we were found, and when would the scavengers come? The sky was dark, or was that the way life flew out of the body, in a long tube with no light at the end? I lay on the cold ground waiting. The mountain was purple, and sage stirred against my face. I knew I had to give up all this, then my own body and all my thinking. Once more I lifted my head to look for the dogs but, unable to see them, I twisted myself until I faced east and tried to let go of all desire.
When my eyes opened again I knew I wasn’t dead. Images from World War II movies filled my head: of wounded soldiers dragging themselves across a field, and if I could have laughed—that is, made my face work into a smile and get sounds to discharge from my throat—1 would have. God, it would have been good to laugh. Instead, I considered my options: either lie there and wait for someone to find me—how many days or weeks would that take?—or somehow get back to the house. I calmly assessed what might be wrong with me—stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, gunshot wound - but it was bigger than I could understand. The instinct to survive does not rise from particulars; a deep but general misery rollercoasted me into action. I tried to propel myself on my elbows but my right arm didn’t work. The wind had swung around and was blowing in from the east. It was still a dry storm with only sputtering rain, but when I raised myself up, lightning fingered the entire sky.
It is not true that lightning never strikes the same place twice. I had entered a shower of sparks and furious brightness and, worried that I might be struck again, watched as lightning touched down all around me. Years before, in the high country, I’d been hit by lightning: an electrical charge had rolled down an open meadow during a fearsome thunderstorm, surged up the legs of my horse, coursed through me, and bounced a big spark off the top of my head. To be struck again—and this time it was a direct hit—what did it mean?
The feeling had begun to come back into my legs and after many awkward attempts, I stood. To walk meant lifting each leg up by the thigh, moving it forward with my hands, setting it down. The earth felt like a peach that had split open in the middle ; one side moved up while the other side moved down and my legs were out of rhythm. The ground rolled the way it does during an earthquake and the sky was tattered book pages waving in different directions. Was the ground liquifying under me, or had the molecular composition of my body deliquesced? I struggled to piece together fragments. Then it occurred to me that my brain was torn and that’s where the blood had come from.
I walked. Sometimes my limbs held me, sometimes they didn’t. I don’t know how many times I fell but it didn’t matter because I was making slow progress toward home.
Home—the ranch house—was about a quarter of a mile away. I don’t remember much about getting there. My concentration went into making my legs work. The storm was strong. All the way across the basin, lightning lifted parts of mountains and sky into yellow refulgence and dropped them again, only to lift others. The inside of my eyelids turned gold and I could see the dark outlines of things through them. At the bottom of the hill I opened the door to my pickup and blew the horn with the idea that someone might hear me. No one came. My head had swollen to an indelicate shape. I tried to swallow-I was so thirsty-but the muscles in my throat were still paralyzed and I wondered when I would no longer be able to breathe.
Inside the house, sounds began to come out of me. I was doing crazy things, ripping my hiking boots off because the bottoms of my feet were burning, picking up the phone when I was finally able to scream. One of those times, someone happened to be on the line. I was screaming incoherently for help. My last conscious act was to dial 911.
Dark again. Pressing against sore ribs, my dogs pulled me out of the abyss, pulled and pulled. I smelled straw. My face was on tatami. I opened my eyes, looked up, and saw neighbors. Had they come for my funeral? The phone rang and I heard someone give directions to the ambulance driver, who was lost. A “first responder,” an EMT from town who has a reputation with the girls, leaned down and asked if he could “touch me” to see if there were any broken bones. What the hell, I thought. I was going to die anyway. Let him have his feel. But his touch was gentle and professional, and I was grateful.
I slipped back into unconsciousness and when I woke again two EMTs were listening to my heart. I asked them to look for my dogs but they wouldn’t leave me. Someone else in the room went outside and found Sam and Yaki curled up on the porch, frightened but alive. Now I could rest. I felt the medics jabbing needles into the top of my hands, trying uns
uccessfully to get IVs started, then strapping me onto a backboard and carrying me out the front door of the house, down steps, into lightning and rain, into what was now a full-blown storm.
The ambulance rocked and slid, slamming my bruised body against the metal rails of the gurney. Every muscle was in violent spasm and there was a place on my back near the heart that burned. I heard myself yell in pain. Finally the EMTs rolled up towels and blankets and wedged them against my arms, shoulders, hips, and knees so the jolting of the vehicle wouldn’t dislodge me. The ambulance slid down into ditches, struggled out, bumped from one deep rut to another. I asked to be taken to the hospital in Cody, but they said they were afraid my heart might stop again. As it was, the local hospital was thirty-five miles away, ten of them dirt, and the trip took more than an hour.
Our arrival seemed a portent of disaster—and an occasion for comedy. I had been struck by lightning around five in the afternoon. It was now 9:00 P.M. Nothing at the hospital worked. Their one EKG machine was nonfunctional, and jokingly the nurses blamed it on me. “Honey, you’ve got too much electricity in your body,” one of them told me. Needles were jammed into my hand—no one had gotten an IV going yet—and the doctor on call hadn’t arrived, though half an hour had elapsed. The EMTs kept assuring me: “Don’t worry, we won’t leave you here.” When another nurse, who was filling out an admission form, asked me how tall I was, I answered: “Too short to be struck by lightning.”
“Electrical injury often results in ventricular fibrillation and injury to the medullary centers of the brain. Immediately after electric shock patients are usually comatose, apneic, and in circulatory collapse....”