Time did not stop for Cal Misener when he was jolted by lightning. But it did slow down to the milliseconds it took his brain to process an entire realm of information before he was, quite literally, blown off his feet.
First, there was the awareness of the lightning itself. “I was terrified but just in awe of the sheer magnitude and power and volume and brilliance of the light,” he says. “The decibel level of that thunderclap was louder and more violent and more concussive than anything I’ve ever heard.”
Next was the mental calculation of how close the lightning was. The rule of thumb is that if there’s five seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder, the lightning strike is about 1.6 kilometres away.
Misener’s brain did the fast math: the lightning and thunder happened at the same time; therefore the lightning was very, very close.
Then he looked down at his feet. His right foot was on the running board of his camper van. His left foot was on the ground. But the ground wasn’t the way the ground should look at midnight outside his home on Bowen Island. “The undercarriage of the truck and the whole road basically became this bright orange colour. It was like someone had put orange lights underneath my truck.”
And that’s when his body caught up to his brain. He could feel an electrical current go up his right leg and down his left.
Time and reality get a bit fuzzy after that. The way he remembers it, he was able to crawl back to his house — and even back into bed — after the blast of electrical currents threw him to the ground. The way his wife Jane remembers it, she came outside and found him on the road.
“I would probably put a little more credence in her account,” Misener says.
All of this happened in the middle of the night on Aug. 17. Misener had been having an otherwise peaceful sleep when he was awoken by the thunder. Thunder is usually accompanied by rain and he remembered that he had left the windows of the camper van down.
Wearing nothing but his underwear — “Yeah, I know that’s quite a visual” — he put on his Crocs and headed out to the van. He was just about to turn on the ignition to power up the windows when lightning crackled across the sky and into his body.
Misener isn’t sure where exactly the lightning hit. There are no burn marks on the van, the ground or his body, although for a brief time he did smell something burning.
He does know that he had unwittingly become a conduit for Mother Nature’s power. “I couldn't use my legs. They were, they were basically just useless. The pain was so intense, I thought my legs were broken.”
Additional evidence of the electrical current’s force is that it blew his Crocs off his feet. One of the rubber shoes flew about four metres before hitting a wall.
After accepting his wife’s help into the house, Misener calmly asked his wife for a couple of pillows to prop up his legs and get as much ice as she could find. He declined her entreaties to go to the hospital because a) it isn’t easy to get from Bowen Island to Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver in the middle of the night; b) hospitals had a higher risk of getting the novel coronavirus; and c) why ask a doctor to tell you what you already knew?
“I wasn't trying to be flippant or be a tough guy,” he says. “I really felt like ‘I know what's going on here. I just got hit by lightning.’”
He finally relented to her request to call the paramedics. “I forget the actual reading but they took my blood pressure and it was pretty high. It was like 180 over 90 or something and I said, ‘Yeah, because I was scared shitless, so I’m not surprised it is pretty high.’ And then he took my pulse and it was pretty high and I said, 'Yeah, that falls into the same category. I think that would be the same root cause.'”
Once again he told everyone that he didn’t want to go to the hospital. “By the time the paramedics left, my legs had both relaxed, a bit. My left leg actually felt pretty good; my right leg was still pretty sore. I could barely move it and and there was some bruising on my right thigh but it was certainly better. I started to walk around a little bit and basically went back to bed. By the morning it was pretty good. My right leg/right ankle still was a little stiff but, by the following day, I would say I was 100 per cent.”
One hundred per cent, maybe. But not the same as he had been before the lightning strike.
Misener is "chief happiness officer" at High Performance Culture. He works with business leaders to help them create happy workplaces. So that gives you a bit of an idea of his approach to life.
“I'm not a religious man but I'm a deeply spiritual man and I believe that everything happens for a reason. I like to learn from every situation, no matter how drastic or nasty or negative.
“So I’ve now learned a few things, like: don't go outside in a lightning storm. That's a pretty basic one. I also think that, while they're not fashionable, Crocs have their place in this world. And I know that we like to think we're in control of the way things are going to go on any given day. This, to me, was just a reminder that we’re not in control.
“You don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next, from one moment to the next. I know this sounds cliché but, yes, I feel like I'm cherishing every moment. I feel like I'm more awake and more alive. As chief happiness officer, my job is to look for the good in situations and try to remain positive. That’s exactly what I’m doing in this case.
“I often talk about something I call 'meaningful alignment.' What I mean by this is, in simple terms, is doing more of the things that serve you or that you love and less of the things that don't.”
And, thanks to the lightning storm of Aug. 17, this philosophy just became a lot more real for Misener. “This isn't a theoretical thing. This is true — moments are fleeting in our life so let's just get on with it, get on with the things that need to happen. The way to do that is not to live in a place of fear. I really want to choose to live in a place of courage and just do the things that scare me even when you don't know exactly how they're going to work out. It’s OK to take that one little step today; maybe that can get you towards the things that you want for tomorrow.”
Does that include going outside to close the windows of his camper van the next time there’s a thunderstorm?
“No,” he laughs. “I think I'll draw the line there. I don't think I want to poke Mother Nature in the eye more than once.”
