My almost fearless tech, SP, who had been with me for four years and got his Master’s degree, left this weekend for a real job. Silly boy. A group of us went to dinner on Thursday to say good-bye, and someone asked if anyone knew any good/embarrassing stories about him.
I don’t know why everyone looked at me.
Another friend said, “Tell the story about Lightning Peak.”
So I did.
Last year, SP and I killed ourselves to put in the most beautiful barbed-wire hair snares anyone has ever seen. And we hiked them far off the roads to increase our chances of getting bears to come into them. Hiking them off roads in our study area meant hiking straight up. Our study area is not only very steep, it gets things called micro-cells, tiny storms that blaze through the area in minutes. When I say tiny, I mean one cloud. When I say storm, I mean full on thunder, lightning and a downpour of rain or hail. When I say minutes, I mean like five. And sometimes you will see the storm, but it will NEVER COME YOUR WAY.
One day, while SP and I were pounding barbed-wire into trees on top of a rather high ridge, I felt the wind kick up. I looked out over the horizon and saw IN THE FAR OFF DISTANCE a black cloud and a single bolt of lightning. Stupidly and quite casually, I said, “Hmm…lightning.”
SP looked up from what he was doing and said, “Oh, shit, lightning? Where? I’m out of here.” Then he dropped his tools and ran down the ridge, leaving me alone.
“Uh…Okay, I’ll just finish up,” I said as he disappeared from sight.
To this day that story makes me laugh because SP is a six-foot-tall, two-hundred pound, twenty-something male who left a five-foot-five, one hundred and thirty pound, forty-something female alone on a ridge to get struck by lightning…that never came our way.
