A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  He described how and why electricity courses through our brains and why almost all of us have had neurological problems. “Electricity enters the body and always follows the path of least resistance, and that means arterial blood, which is very oxygenated. It follows the arteries to the heart and up through the brain. Your brain is seventy percent water. When electricity comes in, you are being used as a conduit, and it fries your brain no matter where on your body the lightning enters and exits—it always circulates through the brain. That’s why some of you see light. It’s nothing mystical: it’s your temporal lobe lighting up. Nerves are like wet noodles; after electrocution they are more like cooked spaghetti.”

  Lightning can affect the medulla, cortex, frontal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. It can affect blood pressure, heart, memory, motor control, sleep and dreaming, cholesterol and blood sugar, and the entire immune system, and it can cause epileptic seizures. “The trouble is,” Dr. H. continued, “nervous function doesn’t show up on CAT scans or X-rays or EEG’s. Those tests they give you are useless! Electricity doesn’t go to areas doctors are used to, so they just dismiss it.”

  He described the sensory damage that occurs in front of the heart and in the back, in the thoracic spinal region. “And it hurts, doesn’t it?” he said. “And they don’t know why.” He described dizziness, buzzing in the ears, headaches, numbness in face and arms, vision and hearing problems, impotence, frequent urination, cataracts, seizures, cancer, and chronic pain. A participant stood and said, “My tongue feels like it’s burning all the time.” Dr. H. nodded. “There are eleven billion nerve cells and ten billion guardian cells and they’ve all been fried!”

  Dr. Mary Cooper became interested in lightning victims during her work as an emergency room physician in a large Chicago hospital. When a patient came in who had been hit by lightning, she went to the literature to find out what treatment was recommended and found that no such literature existed. She ended up writing the book herself. It is still the only guide for the treatment of lightning injuries.

  “I grew up in rural Indiana. My parents didn’t go to college and I was made to feel that only a man could go to med school. I was majoring in biochemistry, and one day the dean suggested I apply to medical school. I guess that’s all I needed—someone to tell me it was okay, and I’ve never regretted it.”

  Just back from a conference of physicists and meteorologists, Dr. Cooper gave statistics: “The most dangerous part of a storm is before it really starts, when the convection activity is strongest. That’s when lightning is most frequent. How many of you were struck when there was blue sky over your head?” Most of us raised our hands. She continued. “Lightning in winter is very dangerous because of the increased moisture content in the atmosphere. There are about three hundred direct strikes on humans per year, with a thirty percent fatality rate, which is high as fatality rates go, but it means that more people are injured by lightning as are killed.”

  She showed a slide of a headline from a tabloid: LIGHTNING TURNS WOMAN INTO MAN. She grinned. “Now, I can see how that could happen the other way around ...” Another slide: lightning hitting a graveyard in Toronto—the gravestones lit up, the cityscape behind. A participant stood: “I was hit by lightning as I was walking out of church one Sunday.”

  More statistics: lightning carries ten to thirty million volts and passes through you in one thousandth to one ten-thousandth of a second. It’s not the voltage that matters as much as the length of time it spends in your body. Skin, if it’s dry and clean, is a primary resistor to electricity, but if the skin is wet—from sweat or rain—the resistance goes to nothing. It becomes a conductor. Lightning causes spotty damage to the protective sheaths around nerves and sometimes the cell itself, and these heal imperfectly. So when an ordinary impulse comes traveling down a nerve, it hits these damaged areas and jumps track, misfires, or crossfires, causing pain.

  She told stories: “Lightning entered the hole in the throat of a man who’d had a tracheotomy. A whole baseball team was knocked down by a lightning stroke; one of them went into cardiac arrest: he survived for a few days, then died. One kid who was hit had an orange ball of fire come out of his mouth, fly through the air and kill a cow, then bounce back and hit him in the chest, killing him too. Now we think that electricity can also go in through the nose and ears.”

  A list of lightning-prevention tactics followed: during a storm, don’t use the phone; don’t sit in the bathtub or wash dishes near an open window; don’t stand by a tree, or continue playing golf, or sit in a metal canoe on the water, or use a fishing pole, or ride a horse. After, Dr. H. stood once again and gave a list of foods and drugs to be avoided if you have suffered an electrical injury; no alcohol, chocolate, hot dogs (nothing with nitrites), MSG, or sharp or strong cheese. No narcotics with benzodiazepine base, like Valium and Prozac.

  After lunch there was a small auction. Rose leaned over to me: “Last year I won an extension cord for a door prize.” We laughed until tears came. She looked fragile and tired and I said something about all of us needing some sleep. She told me that since her electrocution she has never slept through the night. There are always “night terrors” that wake her. “One night recently I woke up and didn’t know what my name was. I looked over at my husband and I knew his name but not my own. I lay there for a long time but nothing came into my mind. Who was I? Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I got up, found my wallet, and looked at my driver’s license and had to study my picture and my name. Once I knew who I was, I could sleep.”

  In my motel room facing the Smoky Mountains, I opened the windows wide. Across the road, mountains rose up. It had been raining. The moon drifted through rain clouds, and intermittent patches of dogwood lit up as if, here and there, the moon was touching down in the thick forest. I thought of those humans who had awakened after being hit and became shamans and healers, and wondered what this new life of mine would be, carved from a ruined body and a ruined marriage, and what special passageways I could hollow out as in a labyrinth of dead ends.

  chapter 24

  I dreamed that the shape of this book should be a convection cloud, a rising bubble swarming with up and down drafts of electricity, moisture, and air. Inside, the narrative would zigzag like lightning and the pages would be laid end to end to resemble a tree trunk, a channel down which fire suddenly flows. Once the book had been read, the top of the cloud would explode leaving the reader holding a burned shell.

  chapter 25

  After the lightning conference I left Sam at the ranch in Wyoming herding sheep because, I rationalized, one of us had to work for a living, and because herding dogs are easily bored. I began dreaming again. I slid from the top of a cresting swell down into a green trough... A tsunami crushed the roof of my beachhouse ... I was on a ship filled with dogs stacked like crates of strawberries....

  My travels had taken me from Wyoming to Alaska to North Carolina to Wyoming. Now yellow leaves spotted Wyoming’s cottonwood trees and snow began falling in the high country where herds of elk traveled secret paths through black timber, grazing at dusk and dawn in tiny “parks,” open meadows, then hiding again. It was time to go back to California.

  Halfway down a Wyoming highway I stopped, turned around, drove back north, stopped, and headed south again. The evening before, I had laid a map of the world on the floor of a friend’s house and spun a beer bottle around on it. Where it stopped, I’d go: Africa, Asia, the Arctic, Idaho. But I was barely well enough to drive to the next state. “You better just come home,” Blaine said when I called in to report on my health.

  The highway meandered and I meandered off the highway, little junkets down forest service roads to obscure mountain slopes. It wasn’t the same, traveling without Sam.

  There was no right way to go, no airborne fragrance luring me. I wanted to commit my body to some gravityless place. But that’s what I had been doing anyway; for a year I had been treading water in the gap—it was my swimming hole, my highwa
y, my home away from home, and it looked like I would continue to do so. Turn back again or not, all routes led to limbo, were paved with the stuff of limbo.

  I returned to a wet fall in drought-stricken Santa Barbara. “This is the longest El Niño we’ve had in fifty years,” one meteorologist exclaimed. El Niños occur when winds along the equator fall off and warm air moves eastward from the western Pacific. Sea surface temperatures climb and moist air in the central Pacific disrupts the jet stream, and, therefore, the normal seasonal rainfall in Asia, the Americas, and Africa. With the appearance of El Niño, droughts in western North America, northern Mexico, and central South America ended, while they commenced in normally lush southern Africa, the Philippines, and northern Australia. Who knew how long it would stay that way?

  In the foothills of California, streams and waterfalls appeared where none had existed before. Houses slid into a rising ocean, dams spilled, steelhead trout swam up what had been for fifteen years a dry river. Every few days the sun rose through broken venetian clouds, then those were swiped by rain. House-sized boulders slid, and flooded streets were axle-deep in rainwater. Plowing through one of those deep troughs late at night, a stroke of lightning came down close, spearing standing water—a gold thread I could climb, if only I had someplace to go.

  Once inside the house, I stayed away from open windows and didn’t answer the telephone. Everything was wet. Huddled in blankets in the middle of the floor, I read the words of an African Bushman: “I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another....” In my sleep I climbed crazy ladders and green, twisted lianas that swung me from one internal storm to the next, and I rolled on the coiled heads of kelp roots—sea brains—that bounced onto shore.

  Water ran everywhere as if pumped, the venous return of streams pressing into the arterial sea. Rain moved mountains; softened earth rode stream water down past the hardwood of manzanita and black sage, past the edge of the continent into halibut waters, and I thought of a place in the mountains where water seeped, went inside that spring through the branching nerves of ocher earth until it reached an opening—dank, wet, closed—a cave where the ceiling rained down deer, and when I tried to kiss those rocks, every animal drawn there leapt out, free at last, and ran hard under cold starlight mixed with human rain. Sam waited out El Niño lying on his back, paws in the air. “Why fight it?” he thought. Some afternoons we both lay that way, with our heads butted against the living room’s long windows to feel the storm’s percussive blasts.

  Even when the rain stopped the land kept moving. Sandstone bluffs ran into the sea, streams carved deep creases into smooth treeless hills, and the stars slid in meteor showers straight across the sky. In other seasons it was not water that moved mountains but fire that peeled scrub oak and chaparral, and in the seasons between fire and flood, the earth’s tectonic plates lifted and thrummed like the flukes of passing gray whales.

  I wondered if growing up in such a place had fostered my nomadism: I designed furniture that pulled apart, folded, and broke down into neat stacks. Since arriving in California, I had moved four times and it looked as if I would move again. Was it the land running under my feet or my feet running over the land? Water—in the form of rain and waves—runneled up through me.

  One morning I watched a coyote pick his way through a cattle pasture and slide down an eroded bluff to the beach. He chased a lizard, then a sand crab. Under a rock, he dug out a half a sandwich wedged there by a surfer and took it in his paws, pulled the bread from the plastic sack and trotted off, bits of avocado sliding from his jaws.

  Humans are almost as adaptable as coyotes. With every move to a new house and every gain in health, I said to myself, “This isn’t bad, I can live with this,” though in a month or two I had already shed that skin. I began to understand the meaning of “life sentence”: my old life had been erased in one-thousandth of a second and now I was trying to fly with clipped wings.

  Another Christmas came and went and another New Year. More dark and violent rainstorms undulated across bare hills and fell into the sea. I longed for snow—still and bright—and flew to Wyoming. As soon as I arrived, there was a January thaw. The temperature rose from twenty below to forty above in one day. A dignified friend in his seventies was seen trudging through melting snowdrifts in camouflage coveralls, Sorrel packs on his feet, and carrying a bent umbrella. A front moved through and snow turned to rain. A rainbow rose out of the river that sliced the ranch in half. Heifer calves, kept over from the fall to be bred the following year, were found stuck in mud that had thawed, then refrozen.

  The fur coats of the ranch horses were so thick I couldn’t tell who was who, with long chin hair, thick ankles and tiny mustaches on their muzzles. “My little gangsters,” I called them, and they descended on me as a group, searching the palms of my hands for grain.

  On my birthday, friends cooked a glamorous meal with ingredients Federal Expressed in from a city. I could only think of the birthday parties I used to give my dogs, all of whom were born in August. They were attentive guests and the menu was simple: half a pound of hamburger per dog, grilled medium-rare over coals in a pit dug in the ground.

  I stood outside my small cabin and looked northeast—in the direction of my old ranch. As the crow flies, it wasn’t far, but there was a mountain range between us. How might I fly there? I wondered. To that sacred spot halfway up a towering mountain, beneath a waterfall and above a quarry of dinosaur bones? I stared a hole through that mountain—a hole in the wall, so to speak—and like eyes whose muscles have weakened and wander in the head, taking no direction from the conscious mind, I could not turn away.

  Just when the thaw broke and snow began falling thickly, it was time to go back to California. In February I had to move again. The new house was twenty miles north of Santa Barbara where cattle grazed open slopes that bend down to the sea. A rocky beach came with it and a view of my favorite island, San Miguel. That week Sam was put on a plane bound for Los Angeles to spend the winter with me.

  I arrived at the Continental Airlines freight dock at 10:00 P.M. just as his cage was being unloaded. It had been six months since I had seen him. He’d gained weight, muscled out, and had a full Wyoming winter coat that made him look less like a fox and more like a long-eared bear.

  On the way up the coast, we ate fat hamburgers—his usual welcome-home treat—cooked to order in a Malibu bistro. As we drove up the highway I wondered if he remembered the smell of the sea and the sight of dolphins. At the new house he looked puzzled. “Yes, we’ve moved again,” I told him, though this time I’d picked a place as much for him as for me. There was open country to walk in, a peace as sweeping as the vistas, and he could come and go at will.

  A bellowing cow woke us. Sam shot off the bed, out the door, down the hill, into the ravine, and up the far ridge toward twenty pairs of black angus cows and their calves. Once there, he sat down and gazed back in the direction of the house—a long distance away—his look asking: Why aren’t you on a horse, why aren’t we moving these cattle somewhere? Which is what he knew was right, being a veteran of intensive—as opposed to continuous—grazing.

  Despite his disappointment about the cattle, Sam liked the new house, and so did I. Behind us was a wide corridor of grazing preserve, oak savannah never to be developed, and behind that, steep mountains with a blue coat of oak brush, manzanita, ceanosis as thick as Sam’s winter hair.

  Between storms, heads rolled—the tangled roots of kelp, that is, which looked like heads. In fact, what I was seeing were not heads but feet, called haptera, of macrocystis, a seedless, sexless kelp that grows in ocean water two hundred feet deep—at a rate of two feet per day. The beach was a seaweed salad: bits of sea lettuce, rockweed, wing kelp, and sea palm were tossed together, wrapped with
delicate strands of eelgrass.

  Torn clouds—clouds left over from the weekend’s rain strode across the sky, trying to catch up with the storm on its way; incoming clouds were shaped like spare parts: elbows, foreheads, and insect legs, and in their fast-footed skudding, they showed how our fragmented passions can be pieced together as stories.

  chapter 26

  Blaine called to see if I wanted to go on rounds with him again. I thought for a moment. “I want to see a human heart. Actually see one beating.”

  “Okay.” Then: “You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?”

  We met at seven in the morning at the hospital. He had cleared the way for me to watch open-heart surgery with Rick Westerman, a thoracic surgeon, not from a glassed-in observation room but standing at the surgeon’s elbow. I changed into hospital pants and top. In the scrub room Blaine handed me booties and a cap, tied on my mask, then dropped his own on the floor. “That’s why I never became a surgeon. I’d never get out of scrub! My patients would die waiting for me.”

  We entered the OR and I was introduced to the surgeon, Rick, the assisting surgeon, Charlie, Gary the anesthesiologist, the pump technician, the resident in surgery, and various nurses. Blaine dragged a stool out from under the table and placed it at the head of the operating table between Rick and Gary, then waved goodbye because he had patients to see.

  Stepping up on the stool, I was a traveler, a Marco Polo who had arrived in a place so exotic, few had seen it before. I peered over the blue towel, clipped between two IV stands, that served as a curtain to protect the patient’s head. The surgeons were watching. Would I faint, they wondered? But what I saw was so abstract, so colorful and jewel-like, I wanted only to see more.