diabolicelectricity

I got caught out in a downpour last week - one of dozens that passed through Boston over a few days. I'd been observing cell towers on building roofs, looking up, trying to get to high places where I could see the equipment clearly. Details would bore you - it was a mapping thing.

The storm came in fast with a lot of rain, and I took cover under an awning in University Park. The lightning quickly became constant, and the thunder was ominous and unusual - not bangs and cracks but more of a sustained hissing, like something enormous and angry struggling to form its first words.

Before long the lightning struck this...

...which was no surpise. Just look at it. The Tech-Gothic prow of the Meridien Hotel just sits there like a kind of invitation to electrical storms. And here I was tampering with RF antennas and beacons on the tops of buildings, tempting fate. That's what I thought while I stood there under that awning, getting a creepy kind of Nikola Tesla, stealing-secrets-from-God vibe.

After some particularly menacing hisses the lightning reached across the sky laterally like fingers on a witch's hand in a kind of confirmation of the storm's strangeness. The noise was outrageous. There was no sign of another human being - not even a moving car - anywhere in the Park or along Sidney Street.

The worst of the rain ended and I hopped on my bike and rode the three blocks home. When I got there I found a maple limb - 6" wide at the base, maybe 20 feet long - split from its tree high above the street and smashed through the windshield of my car.


It had pushed straight through the glass and impaled the driver's seat. The car was parked precisely where I had seen her back in February.

That was July 19, which is the day Margaret Fuller drowned in 1850.