A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Hiking the steep trail of one island, we came on bear shit, purple from berries and still steaming and three tiny ponds at the top of the hill held blossoming water lilies, Alaska cotton, and bog orchids. On seeing these, Jonathan, the captain, said, “It’s so beautiful it makes me feel faint,” and we hoped he wouldn’t see anything that beautiful while at the helm. On the way down the mountain, we ran into the mother bear and her two cubs, and squeezed by her apologetically as she sniffed our air nonchalantly, then thrust her paw into a thicket of bunchberry shrubs.

  When we entered Nelson Bay, a seal circled us, but dove when we whistled hello. Two years earlier the schooner had dragged anchor during the night and gone aground. I slept alone on deck in rain, wedged between winches, wrapped in tarps—it was Hitchcockian—tike sleeping in a torn curtain. During the night, Jonathan yelled in his sleep and I listened for metal dragging over rock, though I wasn’t sure if it was something I would be able to hear. The anchor held. At dawn Jonathan, Kerry, and I winched in the chain, shortened the lines of the Umista, and got under way while the four other passengers slept. The Crusader pushed through clouds until there was a clearing: ahead, Baird’s glacier was a stepladder of retreating ice that led to daylight.

  From Sitka I flew to Juneau, where I met up with Brendan Kelly, a seal biologist whom I had visited in the Canadian High Arctic the year before, and two National Park Service biologists who were friends of his. We headed “up bay”—Glacier Bay—by skiff for one of the distant glaciers. Out of Bartlett’s Cove, whales breached like blossoming flowers and porpoises guided us around a wide bend to the entrance of the bay. In five hours we moved from spruce forest to cottonwoods to ice. Halfway there, cottonwood seeds floated thickly on water, a hint of how the surface would look dotted with ice. Then the water went from blue to green—glacial flour. We were moving backwards in time, through what Brendan called “a textbook scene of succession,” from climax forest to bare, uncolonized soil, and where glaciers had retreated, newly exposed ground “rebounded,” rose up from the compression of heavy ice.

  On the way we paddled kayaks. Rafts of ducks three thousand strong parted as we approached, the bones of my paddle catching a shoulder of sun. Held in both hands, the paddle was a sheaf of lightning, dipping, flashing, dipping. I was a poor woman’s wounded Zeus—ignoring chest pain and dizziness—my only guide the pointed bow of the kayak.

  As we approached, ducks broke into disparate nations, flapping through mist. Bears roamed the beaches of every island, rolling in tall grass, but still I knew I had “been nowhere” and “seen nothing.” I was just gliding...

  Back in the Park Service’s fourteen-foot skiff, we continued up bay, then turned west into Johns Hopkins Inlet. As the frequency of icebergs increased, we were forced to slow to an idle, pushing ice floes aside—heavy as despair—with oars. The inlet, half a mile wide, felt narrower because of the scale of the mountains: ahead, Mount Fairweather loomed to 13,000 feet. On both sides shear cliffs topped by towering peaks shed their snow in avalanches, and charcoal waterfalls tumbled over black ice, scarring white rock. Then we came to where the universe was falling apart.

  The glacier looked industrial, 10,000 years of dredged-up dirt swirled into fractured ice and recesses of blue. It calved al most continually in thundering amputations—thunder with no lightning for once—and the shock waves that radiated out from the fallen fragment displaced so much water, the whole inlet undulated.

  We camped on granite ledges near the face of the glacier. In back of us were vertical cliffs leading to the avalanched slopes of Mount Fairweather. Below, thousands of seals hauled out on floating icebergs and dozed on their backs with flippers folded like hands, or lay on their sides with tail flippers curled up, sometimes five to a berg, though some pieces of ice were only large enough to accommodate one seal. Behind them the glacier crumbled, an intricate city whose façade of blue light kept collapsing in.

  From my granite perch I looked down bay and saw how the charcoal waterfall had bored four holes through a wide ledge of black ice suspended between two promontories of rock—an elegant Italian fountain of black marble. Is there any beautiful thing we have made that has not appeared first in nature?

  While Brendan and Beth started their seal count, I traveled the entire inlet with binoculars. After being on a boat for two weeks it felt as if the granite was lifting and dropping, the way lovemaking in a cabin on the edge of a Big Sur cliff had felt vertical—dropping down to crashing surf, then rising on careening layers of fog.

  The bay was littered with ice, and reflections of snow on mountain peaks strobed across water. Sharp reports and sounds like gunfire emanated from shattering ice whose tiniest pieces looked like creatures from the Burgess shale: forms we’ve never seen before but from whose primeval shapes came the idea for fox, loon, swan, boat, plane, bear, dog, whale, and human. There were no eagles there, just ravens—the ones who brought light to the world, then stole it back.

  For a moment I sensed death’s presence though I didn’t know why. Maybe it had to do with geography: here, at the head of an inlet of dark water was the beginning and end of the world, and I could go no farther, but only face the glacier’s moving wall of black dirt and light.

  Death is a dark thing but it is also an illumination. Light is the other side of the coin from death, but the same coin nevertheless. When we are close to death or come back from death, we see light and move toward it—whether it has to do with “seeing into” things or staying alive. Ritual death followed by resurrection stands for the death of ego. It is the hero’s journey and the teacher’s—like Jesus’ and the Buddha’s—as well as any shaman’s or healer’s. To become a shaman is to have experienced a strong calling, often marked by a bout with near-insanitv or severe illness first.

  Some Eskimos say that compared to shamans, ordinary people are like houses with extinguished lamps: they are dark inside and do not attract the attention of the spirits. Their word qamaneq means both “lightning” and “illumination”—because in their culture physical and metaphysical phenomena are considered to be the same.

  In the rain at Johns Hopkins Glacier we built a lean-to with oars and tarps and set up our humble kitchen as shock waves from newly calved icebergs broke at our feet. We collected drinking water from a trickling spring that descended through dwarf willows on the slope whose steep wall bound us to our ledge. It was good to be away from the mists and sorrows of the human world, with its big trees and heavy schooners and green nightmares. Here the raw face of the glacier dominated, its deeply crenellated top, black and rough like a city seen from above.

  Our large sleeping tent, staked farther up the slope, was shaken by the glacier’s detonations and echoing thunder all night. I wrote in my journal by flashlight: “I feel as if I were a fish feeding at the crumbling edge of the universe.” I wanted to wear clothes made from that place—perhaps an auklet feather skirt—and sleep on the white fin of an orca.

  One day Brendan and Beth scaled the cliff and disappeared. Just a hike, they said. Leaving me with an aching heart on my slip of granite and no way home. Perfect, I thought. The perfect place to die, not that anyone said I was going to. My calendar reminded me that it was August 6th, the first anniversary of my lightning strike, and also Blaine’s birthday. When we discovered this coincidence, he said simply, “As the New Agers would say, we were destined to meet.”

  While waiting for Beth and Brendan to reappear, I read a Hudson Bay legend, translated by my friend Howard Norman, about a blind boy and his aunt who was struck by lightning. “I’ve been lightning-struck and I’ve become an eater of rotten seal-flippers, fish eyes and bird throats. This is bad luck. Bad luck. Nephew, life has taken a turn for the worse. What’s more I’m more thirsty than you can possible imagine.” After she was struck the boy held a vigil beside her. Her hair had turned “stiff as feather quills,” her skin deeply creased, she moaned in pain, and a fever moved about in her body, which only increased her thirst. “A lightning-struck pe
rson gets enormously thirsty. You have to keep a close watch because such a person will try to drink the entire sea,” the boy’s father warned him.

  I lay a plastic bottle sideways in the spring and let it fill, then drank the water. I had been that thirsty after being struck, and months later often woke in the night, burning up with thirst. Perhaps this glacier would quench me. Another city of ice collapsed, sending a shock wave so big it almost wiped out our kitchen. I thought of another Eskimo shaman story: “When the bear of the glacier comes out he will devour you and make you a skeleton and you will die. But you will awaken and your clothes will come rushing to you.”

  I scanned the mountains for the dark shape of a grizzly. Too steep, I thought, and not enough to eat along the way to make it worthwhile. When the tide went out, all the seal-inhabited icebergs floated toward the bay, then back again with the swing of the tides. This was the inlet of devotion and transparency where illusion washed back and forth, a place that could teach me to see. Night came but it was not dark, only gray, and the face of the glacier turned bright, as if a huge slab of moon had been cut off and laid against the mountains.

  My friends returned shortly before midnight, bruised and exhausted. They had been lost and had fallen. I was glad to see them but their self-inflicted drama didn’t interest me and I went to bed. I heard groaning: very slowly a house-sized ice floe rose from under dark water. Its hulking bottom half was clogged by black dirt and rubble, but on top lay an elegant blue pyramid of ice, like something from the drawing board of I. M. Pei.

  chapter 23

  “I felt my left arm burning and falling. Then I saw it drop. I screamed, but no one could hear me. The current made me arch back like a fish in a frying pan. I was floating. The most terrible pain turned into something warm and peaceful. I thought I was talking to my father, then I heard my heart start beating....”

  This story was told at the Third Annual Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Conference in which I was a participant. Sixtyfive of us, all survivors of damaging electric shock and direct lightning hits had gathered in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, to tell our stories. The year before, the conference had broken up for a day because the lightning storms were so violent. The doctors who had come as guest speakers found people under tables and beds, and had to dole out tranquilizers instead of giving their talks.

  We convened in a closed-down dining room and bar, sipping Cokes we bought from a vending machine in the hall. A number of the participants were severely disabled—some endured missing limbs, or had the shakes, motor and speech problems. A woman who had been struck by lightning while hanging clothes out to dry had trouble walking, talking, even standing up. When I sat down, the others looked at my name tag and asked, “Lightning or electric shock?” “Lightning,” I told them. “When?” they asked, and I said August’91, and they nodded knowingly.

  The group was organized by Steve Marshburn, who had been hit at his drive-up bank-teller window by a lightning stroke from a storm seven miles away. “It came in via the speaker and traveled through my arm, hand, groin, leg, exiting from my right foot,” he said. Steve was driven to the local doctor, who knew nothing about lightning injury, so he was sent on to a neurologist in Wilmington, Delaware, who did nothing but give him a prescription for the headaches that had begun since the strike. The pain all over his body increased, his eyes became sensitive to light, he suffered frequent urination, insomnia, and couldn’t grip with his right hand. “I couldn’t seem to find any doctor who understood. They thought I was making it up, or was crazy.” Another doctor put him in traction for six weeks, after which he went back to work. But on his way home he had a car accident and subsequently needed back surgery. Meanwhile the headaches and body aches continued, and his throat, still partially paralyzed, caused him to choke easily on food. A few years later he had a radical prostatectomy after a malignant tumor was discovered, which he feels was caused by the strike.

  After being put on 100 percent medical disability, Steve Marshburn and his wife, Joyce, formed Lightning Strike and Electric Shock International, in 1989. “I was permanently disabled,” he said, “and during a long recuperation period I started writing to others who had been struck. Then we realized there were long-lasting after-effects and that people needed help. So little is known about electrocution. Now we can direct people to doctors who have knowledge and experience with electrical injury and give them a support group to relate to.”

  Harold Deal was struck by lightning while walking from his truck to the house. He was thrown over a fence and into his neighbor’s yard, a distance of fifty feet. “It was as if I had stepped into a very soft white cotton ball. It was so bright I couldn’t see anything at all.” He said he couldn’t move his body and his head felt like it had been pulled down behind his shoulder blades. In the next four days he lost thirty-eight pounds. He couldn’t sleep or eat.

  He’s now known around his town of Lawson, Missouri, as “Weird Harold” because the lightning affected his thermostat—a result of the injury to his autonomic nervous system—and he can’t feel cold; nor can he taste food or feel sensory pain, and any lacerations heal extremely quickly.

  In 1989 Harold Deal and Steve Marshburn and his wife, Joyce, joined together and while Steve and Joyce took care of the administrative tasks, Harold became the guardian angel of lightning strike survivors. He corresponds with any victim of lightning or electric shock, often flying to their bedsides to reassure them that they aren’t crazy, that the symptoms they have are shared by others, that proper medical treatment is obtainable and that they will heal.

  Now an airline underwrites his trips. Harold flew to Texas to visit an eleven-year-old boy who had been hit by lightning and lay in a coma for four months. When the boy woke up, he couldn’t remember anything of his life. He suffers total amnesia. “I had to kinda start all over,” he told me at the conference. “And Harold helped a lot. I didn’t know who I was, who my parents were, what I was like as a kid. It’s been kind of weird.”

  I heard more stories. An African-American woman was introduced to me because we were both from California. She

  looked shaken. “I just flew in,” she told me. “I hate flying. Since my accident I don’t care to have anything to do with the sky.” Then she leaned in close and whispered conspiratorily: “I used to be white before I was struck by lightning.” Everyone laughed. She glanced around. “Look at us.... My, my—I don’t know what I’m doing here. With all of us around, lightning’s sure to be attracted to this motel.”

  A stocky young man from Maine asked if I suffered from depression. I said no and he said he did, that he was on all kinds of pills and even though he still had a job, some days he didn’t know if he could go on. A big-boned blonde sat with us and agreed that nothing in her life was the same. “I used to drive in stock car races for police charities for fun on the weekends. Now I don’t do that. My body doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

  Rose was electrocuted when turning on a bank of fluorescent lights in a theater. The switch blew up in her hand. Once a professor, now she has difficulty remembering her own name.

  Robert had no vital signs after he was struck while dismounting his motorcycle in a rainstorm. The driver of a passing Power and Light truck, who saw it happen, stopped and gave Robert CPR. When the medics arrived, CPR was continued but they could not get a blood pressure. Robert remembers hearing something—a woman singing. Then the rescuers saw her too: she was wearing a black dress and held a Bible. She knelt down by Robert, touched one hand to his chest and the other to the earth. Just then, one of the medics yelled: “I have a blood pressure!” Robert survived. While telling me this story, he pulled out a watch. “My father gave me this,” he said. “When I was hit the stem was welded to the case but it still works.” Implying, apparently, that his time had not run out.

  Dr. Englestatter, a neuropsychologist from Jacksonville, Florida, who had been called in on Steve Marshburn’s case years before, began the morning session with talks about the ps
ychological effects of lightning strike or electric shock. While discussing what he called “postelectrocution syndrome”—depression, anxiety, panic, memory deficits, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, profound fatigue, restlessness, insomnia, impotence, night terrors—a young woman in the back of the room broke out crying. I suddenly felt clammy, nauseated, light-headed. “I have to get out of here,” I whispered to Rose. She calmly put her hand on mine and said, “Yes, but where are we?”

  Dr. Hooshmand took the podium next. Dressed in white linen, and of East Indian descent, he was brazen, kind-hearted, outrageous. His speaking style was part Florida car salesman, part physician, and he paced as he spoke. “You all have life sentences and it’s not easy, is it, especially when nobody understands. But I do. None of this is your imagination!” he yelled out and smiled. He went on to say that doctors don’t know what to look for. If they believe you at all, they give tests that show nothing of the damage to the nervous system: CAT scans, EEGs and X-rays. “They’re looking for an elephant when what they should be looking for is tiny damaged nerves, and they don’t know how.” As a result, so many lightning victims are misunderstood. Often the cause of the most serious damage is undetectable.

  “There is no such thing as ‘psychosomatic.’ It’s all brain. Every doctor should have a picture of the temporal lobe hanging over his desk. And if he says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s all in your head,’ he’s absolutely right, he just doesn’t know it. But you do. You’re not crazy, baby!”