I fear electricity and electrical storms. At my worst, I hover under the stairwell during storms. I flinch with each lightning strike at my best. This is at least understandable to those around me who go about their normal business without a quiver. But my phobia about plugging stuff into electrical sockets is downright peculiar, not to mention inconvenient, and it hasn't improved with time.
Those who have read Precious
Jewels, a Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga and Fireflies know that my grandfather, an aunt, and
an uncle were all struck by lightning, and there are more distant members of
the family who share in this legacy of the stricken by lightning on the Denton
side of the family. One of my earliest memories is of my Uncle Lester
lifting his t-shirt to show me the zigzag lightning mark on his lean
torso.
I remember coastal storms where the air hummed with
electrical charge. It was during one of those storms that a ball of
electricity wandered out of an electrical socket between my mother and me when
I was at the crawling stage of life. "Don't
move!" cried my mother, and I was obedient, or else I might number myself
among the family stricken. I admit I probably don't remember this incident, but
my mother told the story so often that I can see it in my mind. This
isn't the only reason I don't trust outlets. I remember clearly
Grandma Denton yanking an entire electrical outlet in flames from the wall. (Grandpa Denton's wiring was among the first in the Green
Swamp, but it was a bit eccentric.)
But that is mild in comparison to what happened later. Two of
the most terrifying incidents in my life involved electricity.
The first incident was when my parents, driving home one
rainy night from Wilmington NC, tried to pass a store that was burning in a
tiny one-street town, and drove into a hail of falling electrical wires. Daddy and I have compared memories of
this incident over the years. Daddy's
reflexes were normally, er, lightning fast, but he admits that the
situation overtook us so quickly and in such a horrifying manner that he froze
at the wheel, and we went neither forward nor backward for a period of time
which we disagree upon. Child
time and adult time being different, Daddy says it was less than a
minute. I swear that I
counted backwards from 100 to 1 before I took action to save myself. When
I saw that we were still sitting there and the wires were still going crazy
around us, I opened the car door, and leaped about twenty feet (again, kid
math) and started running in superhuman bursts to safety, dancing over wires
that hissed like snakes and soaring over fallen branches that writhed like
prehistoric monsters.
I was nearly clear of the conflagration when Daddy yelled at
me to get back into the car, which he later agreed was probably unwise, but who
has the luxury to think these things out while a catastrophe is
occurring? I obeyed,
because that was the way my parents trained me. I turned around and faced the snapping jaws and hissing snakes again and leaped back into the car. All I remember
for certain immediately after that was that the car was now moving and Daddy was informing me that I could have been
killed the second I left the car if a wire had been touching the metal. One thing has remained with me, other
than the fear of electricity. I cannot forget that I abandoned my family in
order to save my own life. It
was pure logic. I could not
save them, so I acted in order to save myself.
The next terrifying event happened about 25 years later when
Kevin and I were trying to bring our first home up to code. Those who know us well already
know that we are insane, but for those who know us less well, I will mention
that we moved into a derelict house on the side of Lookout Mountain. The hundred-year-old house had no
doors or windows, plumbing or electricity, and we squatted there until we had
permission to inhabit temporarily; and, without any money to speak of,
determined to bring it up to code so we could get a mortgage on it before we
were thrown out.
At the same time, we were under attack by the outlaw family
who had once inhabited the burnt shell of a cabin next door to "our"
house, and had a weird fixation on the whole property. It was they who had stripped the house
we were in, and probably they who had tried to burn it down (judging by the
burn hole in one bedroom and the scorch marks in the hall), and it was they who
kept creeping around, sabotaging and burgling us. But we were determined save the house and
live in it.
Well, we required electricity in order to run power tools to
repair the house, so Kevin ran a wire from our fuse box into the fuse box of
the empty house on the other side of us (with permission of the absent
owner). All went well until
the outlaws set another fire to the already-burnt cabin back on the other
side. While three fire
trucks and the general hubbub around them had our attention focused on the
cabin, one of the arsonists sneaked between our house and the house that hosted
the electricity and cut the wires in between, probably intending to steal them
for the copper. This could
have killed them which would have served them right, but there is no accounting
for the behavior of electricity. The
fire trucks had left the cabin and gone down the mountain when we discovered
more fire-- wicked, billowing black smoke and brilliant sparks erupting from the
fuse boxes of our house and the house we had plugged into,
as a result of the severed connection in between.
It was the Wilmington highway all over again, only this time
we were about to burn down two houses. "We'd
better call the fire trucks back," I said, but Kevin reminded me that the
fuse boxes currently blowing up were illegally connected. Personally, I might have preferred
being hauled off to jail than to watch Kevin wrap a shirt around his face and
plunge into hell to disconnect the bare wires from an exploding fuse box. I had a broom in my hand ready to try
to knock him away if he got electrocuted, but I can't swear what I would have
done if he'd electrified because half my mind was on the Wilmington Highway,
and we all know what my instinct was there.
These are only the most dramatic of the traumas that feed my
oversensitivity to all things electrical. In addition to that, I have had two
microwaves blow up on me for no discernible reason. No, I didn't put metal or other
forbidden objects into the microwave. No,
I didn't do anything stupid or against the instructions. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of
the universe, and apparently more rare than seeing a UFO for I have yet find anyone
else who admits to having had a microwave blow up for no apparent reason. (much less two microwaves)
So the trauma of electricity has happened and re-happened in
various horrific incidents throughout my life, giving me more than enough
reason to have developed a full-blown, embarrassing and inconvenient aversion
not only to lightning storms but to the normal things that people do with
electricity. I haven't
given up on overcoming my problem even though I recognize that this could be more than a phobia--rather,
it is a deep-seated reasonable reaction to repeated trauma related to
electricity.
I have to work on the problem in my own way and in my own
time. There are times when I think I'm almost cured, but one unexpected
spark can send me reeling back to my original condition. It cannot be forced. It cannot be
willed. So I just carry on, face my fears when I can face them, and give myself
permission to retreat when it is too hard. I spare myself from the stress of
electrical sparks by using power strips with on and off switches wherever possible. One learns to
be creative in order to function in a world where everything runs with
electricity.
But in the meantime, if you need something plugged straight
into the wall, and can't reach it yourself, and I'm sitting right there…
…well…
…don't look at me.
