The Storm That Kept Me on the Stool

The protocol during a lightning storm is to sit on the stool. It sounds almost funny written down like that, but the legs are glass insulators, and you pull your feet up onto the rungs so nothing you’re wearing is touching the floor, and you sit there through however long the storm takes to pass, which some nights is forty minutes and one night in my third season was closer to six hours.

That one built in the afternoon and didn’t produce much rain, which is the bad kind up here, dry lightning stacking cell after cell over the same drainage without enough water coming down to matter. I’d radioed in the buildup around three, dispatch logged it, and by five I was on the stool for real, not the practice version you do for the first strike or two out of habit, the actual sit-still-and-count-seconds version. You count from the flash to the thunder to get a rough distance, and for a while that count kept getting shorter instead of longer, which is the part that gets your attention regardless of how many seasons you’ve done this.

I watched one strike hit a ridge across the drainage from the tower, close enough that the flash and the sound arrived close enough together that I didn’t get a full count in before the thunder hit. No fireball, nothing dramatic, just a white line and then a sound like something tearing, and I remember thinking with a strange calm that had nothing to do with actual calm, that’s not something I need to identify from up here, that’s something I need to keep an eye on for the next hour and report if it does anything. It smoked a little afterward, thin and pale, the kind that could go either way, and I watched it through the fire finder for the rest of the storm and radioed it in as a possible start once the lightning had moved past enough for me to be reasonably sure nothing else was about to land closer.

It never went anywhere. A crew hiked in two days later, found a scorched patch maybe six feet across around a lodgepole that had taken the direct hit, and called it out, no need for suppression, the terrain around it was rock and sparse enough that it had nowhere to run even if it had wanted to. I’ve thought about that strike more than its outcome probably deserves, mostly because it’s the only one I’ve watched hit ground close enough to see clearly rather than just hear and infer. Most lightning up here is a long way off, flash and a slow count and a rumble, weather happening to somebody else’s ridge.

Six hours on a stool with your feet pulled up and your knees starting to ache is a strange kind of tedium, adrenaline and boredom running at the same time, which I hadn’t known was possible until that night. I read the whole thing afterward as a good storm, professionally speaking, clean data, one confirmed strike, no fire that needed real work. Personally I didn’t sleep well for two nights after, which nobody warns you about when they explain the stool.