A Match to the Heart (4 page)

“How does it feel to have fire enter you?” another friend asked after hearing of my accident. I had no answer. Nothing of the incident remained in my retrievable memory. All the cultural references I knew showed gods throwing lightning bolts, not ingesting them, but like the young fire-eaters I'd seen as a child, stationed on the sidewalks of the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, I had swallowed Fre.

Lightning is a massive electrical discharge occurring in the atmosphere of the earth, as well as on several planets, and can extend from five to ten kilometers in length. There are about
₁
,8
₀₀
thunderstorms in progress over the earth every moment and lightning hits the planet one hundred times each second. In the continental United States alone, there are forty million cloud-to-ground strikes each year.

The life of a 20,000-foot-high cumulonimbus cloud is about twelve hours. It is a city of turrets and towers made out of polygonal convection cells whose interiors are all warm air rushing upward and whose skins are moving walls of cold air. The cumulonimbus is all motion, made of raw energy and mist.

The earth radiates solar energy, warming air, which rises and expands as atmospheric pressure decreases. Taking on altitude, it gives up heat for height. The water inside the cloud condenses and droplets hang on particles of dust. That is how a thundercloud is made. It is a community of cells organized into weather factories in which rain, hail, and snow are dropped to earth, and in which lightning occurs.

Heat and cold, water and dust, that's all it is at inception, but trouble brews. A thundercloud grows unruly, as all cities do, when the shearing stresses between ascending and descending air—as with the wealthy and the poor—result in turbulence. In addition, when dense dry air from outside the cloud is displaced by the updraft, it mixes with saturated air, thus providing a constant supply of recently warmed air full of moisture. This is fed to the upwardly mobile tower. Once begun, the cloud builds on itself, sometimes rising 40,000 feet in the air.

All summer these stately empires sail above Wyoming mountains, processions of cool heads, but inside they are dynamic, chaotic districts drawn into existence by jets of buoyant air, growing in volume and height until they bump into the upper reaches of the stratosphere. Even then, they sometimes continue upward, their turrets penetrating stable layers of air until they can go no further, then they fall back on themselves.

This is only the beginning of the violence a thunderstorm accrues. Benjamin Franklin brought lightning down out of the sky with a kite, a string, and a key. His kite was the object the cloud's electrical charge so desperately sought. Thunderclouds are Hegelian: Electrons and protons are charged particles surrounded by an electrical field that attracts charges of the opposite sign.

Inside the misty cloud-bubble, collisions occur. According to Earle Williams, an MIT geophysicist who gives seminars on lightning, a storm's convection carries water into the cold cloud-top, where it freezes into graupel. Moved vertically, these icy bits collide with other forms of moisture and the friction generates both negative and positive charges.

A thundercloud grows in a state of imbalance. Polarities change back and forth within the cloud as well as on the ground, where the earth's negative charge flips to one that is positive as the storm approaches. Soon, everything is humming with electricity, even individual raindrops. The chaotic acceleration of charge separation taking place divides the cloud into opposing territories that end in a tripole form, a plus-minus-plus structure, like a villanelle, with a strong positive at the top and bottom and, in between, a pancake-shaped region of negative charge.

For a short time the insulating capacity of air prevents the two attracted charges from meeting, but any upright object in the force field becomes a finger that reaches up, straining to touch the other. So loaded is the cloud with electricity, that its negative charge tears a path through the air, stripping off electrons and leaving in its wake positive ions. In the newly carved channel, a sudden flow of electricity slurries down. All this has taken a fraction of a second.

But lightning is not a one-way street. As soon as its tip nears the favored object or area, upward-moving discharges, called “return leader strokes,” fly up to an ionized path traveling a third or more times the speed of light. When the return stroke has ceased to flow, another dart leader may drop down, in turn initiating a second return stroke, and so on. Contrary to popular belief, lightning loves to strike the same place twice, since it always follows the path of least resistance. What could be handier than reusing this ionized channel?

The Navajo word for thunder is
I'ni,
meaning “that which moans indefinitely.” When the lightning stroke goes back up from the ground, the current surges to 100,000 amperes, or 100 million watts per meter of channel, and the temperature rises to 30,000°K. This heated air causes gases to expand in the discharge channel and a shock wave is sent traveling, quickly decaying into an accoustical wave whose signal, or “signature,” is what we call thunder.

Thunder is nature's unique percussion symphony. Pliny wrote in A.D. 77 that it was unsafe to speak of certain kinds of thunder, or even listen to it, lest it bring bad luck. On the other hand, he also noted that Romans used thunder as a tool of divination to predict events, and listened to it to hear secret messages.

We now know that thunder's wavelength is determined by the length, duration, and total energy of the lightning stroke. Instead of reading thunder to know our fortunes, we use it to “read” lightning. For example, the lower the pitch of the thunder, the more powerful the lightning strike has been.

The violence and energy produced by a thunderstorm starts as a spark, then many sparks conjoined and flowing as if seeking to illuminate a dark patch of ground or make incandescent every window of a darkened city with its sudden, ephemeral light. The electricity inside a cloud sweeps back and forth, up and down, always seeking the path of least resistance, while the dynamics of convection works like a heart, pumping air and moisture up through the valve of the cloud and pushing electricity down through an artery. Nothing is ghostlier than lightning's light: pale, colorless, it serves up frozen instants, then disassembles those phantasms and delivers them back to darkness.

 
 
We swim in an ocean of air, in magnetospheric, ionospheric, and tropospheric currents bound together by a global electrical circuit. The surface of the earth gives off a negative charge, which is met equally by a positive atmospheric charge whose conductivity increases with altitude. Galactic cosmic rays bring positive and negative ions into the earth's atmosphere but it is thunderstorms that generate huge amounts of electricity. They are the factories that keep the global circuits going.

There are intracloud, intercloud, and cloud-to-air flashes —heat and sheet lightning, discharges that never touch the earth. Rocket lightning sends horizontal sprays of light across the tops of windblown clouds, and ribbon lightning's stroke is one that has been separated in the channel by wind, thus giving off a double image; cloud-to-ground lightning (the kind that struck me) breaks into luminous fragments, like a necklace of pearls, but no name has been given to the wild lightning that zigzags in all directions at once.

Ball lightning is controversial, often being discounted the way UFO sightings are, because it is not scientifically understood. Are these luminous globes a brew of storm chemicals (oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) or a “brush discharge”—atmospheric electricity bound together somehow? Or is it a collision of charged dust particles, raindrops, and ions? Sightings of these glowing spheres have been recorded continually from ancient times, as crazy, rolling emanations kicked down from the heavens or from some Jovian beach, sometimes bouncing, sometimes rolling down chimneys or slipping into open windows and disappearing under beds like fiery dust motes. They can move fast or slow, hesitating before they roll, and they can either move against a wind, in defiance of physics, or go with the flow. Not rolling stones, they are bodiless, centerless, with no hard nuclei around which sparks can spin, yet they hiss and sparkle and appear, interchangeably, as balls of gold, blue, white, green, or red. Intensely bright to the human eye, they are often “cold,” or else hot, as in the case of Diane of France, who on her wedding night, in 1557, saw a ball of light pass around her bedroom in an erratic course, finally bouncing onto her covers and burning her clothes and hair.

A “fire dragon” is what Gregory of Tours called it. But as he had already seen flames emanate from certain sacred relics, he was not surprised when a ball of lightning rolled over the top of a religious procession he was leading; he simply proclaimed it another miracle.

“ ‘Look aloft,' cried Starbuck. ‘The corposants! The corposants!' All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tripointed lightning rod end with those tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before the altar.”

That's how Melville described Saint Elmo's fire, also known as “corposants,” from the Italian
corpo santo,
meaning “holy body”—those sudden fires that appear on yardarms, at the tips of wooden masts, between the horns of cattle, at the tips of airplane wings, and around metal objects, especially at high altitudes.

Saint Elmo's fire was named for a fourth-century Italian bishop who was rescued from drowning by a sailor and ever afterward swore to give a warning of approaching storms to sailors at sea. But in fact, by the time Saint Elmo's fire appears, one is in the midst of a storm -too late to do anything about it.

In the journal of his second voyage, Columbus noted: “On Saturday, at night, the body of St. Elmo was seen, with seven lighted candles in the round top and there followed mighty rain and frightful thunder. I mean the lights were seen which the seamen affirm to be the body of St. Elmo, and they sang litanies and prayers to him, looking upon it as the most certain that in these storms when he appears, there can be no danger.”

This “holy body” is actually the swarmlike glow of atmospheric electricity, too low a discharge to be harmful, but high enough to light up the highest points around. Sometimes masses of flying insects carry this incandescent charge and are mistaken for UFOs.

Transient luminous phenomena, like the transient coronary spasms I now experience—tittle cramps in the heart muscle—have been observed by unmanned spacecraft in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and Uranus, whose cloud layers, made of ammonia ice and filled with particles of water, are spawning grounds for lightning. Do they have afternoon thunderstorms on Jupiter? Does Jupiter have afternoons at all?

Storm-related electrical discharges are shrouded in mystery. No one theory of cloud electrification can account for the prodigious amount of current produced in a thunderstorm. Being in the right place at the right time to get samples—as I was—is not an experiment for which you volunteer.

chapter 6

Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends, and I stole a boat in the middle of the night and sailed it out of the Santa Barbara harbor. Suddenly we were becalmed and the current began pushing us toward the breakwall. We could hear the foghorn drone and waves crashing against a rock. With no running lights and no power, we were dead in the water. Out of that darkness a steel hull appeared: it was the local Coast Guard cutter. My father, stern-faced and displeased, stood in the bow.

Now I'm here because of another rescue by my parents. I was born in this hospital, rescued from formlessness, given a body. Am I to die here too? These are the shores between which we are all suspended: the perilous breakwater and the safe harbor, the foggy night and the bright day.

 
 
Just before dawn on the second day, a man on a ventilator, who had not moved since I'd been admitted, died. The alarm went off, crash cart swept by, doctors and nurses hovered over him trying to restart his heart. He lay naked, rotund, a blue tube going down his throat as they worked on him, but too much of his heart muscle had been damaged: it could no longer pump blood. After, the unit was quiet. One of the nurses who had been working all night sat on my bed and wept.

Death always feels like a failure. I told her about how, on the ranch, animals died at dawn, as if to say the energy of facing another day was too great a burden, and how the dead piles outside the lambing shed reached the roof by evening, but the ones we saved made it worthwhile.

Another alarm sounded. Blaine was on the floor, and I could hear him giving directions, cool-headed and firm, and saw his expression of relief as the woman's heart started again.

In a few minutes he appeared at my bedside. With his eyes closed in concentration, he leaned over to listen to my heart. Beads of perspiration jeweled the deep furrow in his forehead and his damp hands trembled slightly.

“What a way to start a morning,” I said, but he only smiled.

“Are you always this cheerful?” I inquired. I wondered if there were any dark corners in this man.

“No, I just hate facing pain. When I'm at the dentist I always ask for double Novocain.”

When he finished the exam, he sat down in a chair. He had a sensual handsomeness and a farmer's big hands and feet.

“My friends always teased me at medical school about being too happy. I made it a rule never to study on weekends. What good does it do to worry?” I asked if he got “As” anyway, and he said, “Oh, I guess so.”

Med school was Cornell with a residency at New York Hospital, a stint at an army hospital in Albuquerque during the Vietnam War, a rotation on the Navajo reservation, and a fellowship in cardiology with Norman Shumway at Stanford University, where Blaine helped perform the first heart transplant.