My wife was reading to me a passage out of a book she as reading. It was so descriptive that I realized I wanted to write something maybe in my own style as descriptive as what she wrote so I thought I would try for a short while doing that.
My family had been swimming at Castle Lake but when the lightning began to strike all around us we realized it wasn't safe to be in the water anymore with many many lightning strikes hitting within 5 to 10 miles of us. You didn't want to be in the water or near the base of any tree because they are like lightning rods in this kind of weather. At this point I hadn't seen what lightning can fully do to a large tree up close and personal.
As I was driving a vehicle that had a 5 gallon bucket in it and at that time I usually carried a shovel especially during fire season if I had to help put out any fire in the area of mt. Shasta. As I started to drive down the road back to the little city of Mt. Shasta with my family I saw 5 or 6 strikes of lightning all at once and smoke which also meant fire started to come up from 3 or 4 of them.
Castle Lake is a real touchstone to my family and I so I wanted to help put out any fires that might start now from the lightning strikes so I turned the vehicle around to go back up to the lake to get water in the 5 gallon bucket so I could carry it down to the nearest smoke I saw from the lightning strikes.
Since I was still wearing bathing trunks (shorts the manzinita cut my legs as I ran through it as fast as I could to try to get to the nearest biggest smoke I saw from lightning in the mountains there.
When I arrived at the site I couldn't believe what I saw which was a huge tree likely a pine or fir (wasn't sure because it killed the tree) and it created a barber pole of the tree as the lightning spiraled down from the top of the tree which was blown off completely from the strike. From there is had gone into a fallen tree on the ground and started the 3 foot through log on fire. So, I started to work on the 3 foot thick and 15 foot long fallen tree that was now a log fire and the whole thing basically was a huge ember coaling and burning and smoking. So, I used the shovel and the water as expeditiously as possible and as efficiently as possible while I waited for Forest service fire trucks to arrive to assist up above on the paved road to Castle Lake. Eventually I heard sirens as trucks started to arrive to mop up all these smokes caused by lightning strikes one by one. Eventually, a crew came down to assist what I was doing and put out the fire completely so I walked back up to my vehicle and drove my wife and children home because I didn't want them involved in a real fire that also might happen up there. Luckily, that day we all succeeded and all the fires within 5 miles of us we put out one by one with ground crews and so I could repack my vehicle with the 5 gallon bucket and shovel that I kept for this purpose on board whenever there was a lightning storm on the horizon and we were going into the forests. So, I was grateful I had prepared for anything that day as I drove my family home to where it was going to be safer for them than up there that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment