Saturday, August 23, 2014

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC (OR NOT) -- Why I fear electricity

 

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.