It was 2 a.m. when I crawled back into the tent and passed a hushed message to my wife: “Something's coming.”
For about an hour, Kim and I had listened to a thunderstorm stalk our island campsite in northern Quebec. But it wasn't the approaching lightning and thunder that drove me to duck in fear during a late-night pee.
Instead, it was the smell of electricity – a dry odour combining heat, static and poolside chemicals – that hung just outside the tent and set my hair standing on end.
In the darkness, we nervously stared at the ceiling as a steady wind and scattered raindrops rustled the top of our flimsy nylon tent.
Then it hit.
The all-enveloping light consumed us. It would be wrong to say we witnessed a flash; the white, yellow, orange and blue filled our senses, whether our eyes were open or shut. The shattering roar was like a rocket engine pushing into my chest and skull, leaving me deaf to everything, including Kim's screams.
It felt like minutes passed, though I've been told it could only have been a fraction of a second.
“Breathe,” I thought, reassured I was still alive as long as I could suck air.
“Keep breathing!” I yelled at Kim, fearing if I was alive she must surely be dead. That much I thought I knew about the fickle ways of lightning.
The smell of burnt hair filled the tent as we alternated between whimpering and hyperventilating. I waited for the shelter to burst into flames.
I smelled for signs the forest was igniting around us. Would a split tree fall on our little orange tent? Would one of us spontaneously combust?
That's when the second lightning bolt hit no more than 100 metres away (the island was small, after all) sending us into one more round of hysterics. This time, it was the more familiar flash-bang of a scary-close strike.
We spent the night reliving the moment and taking inventory. Hands and feet tingled, but there were no wounds. In our examination by flashlight, we failed to find the burnt follicles we could smell. Fluttering hearts and stomachs were first diagnosed as symptoms, then written off as rattled nerves.
When the morning sun rose, we searched for clues. One silver tent pole had new black marks where sections join, seeming evidence of passing current.
Freshly exploded earth marked their connection to the ground.
A new black furrow shot out from the tent into the thicker forest, showing the path of electricity as it searched for a way around bedrock into deeper ground.
We finished the kayak trip two days later.
An incredulous park ranger suggested we see a doctor when we got home but by then all the flutters and tingles were gone.
So we searched for an explanation for how we could have lived through that stormy night.
In the end, we found only one: luck.
