Too Close for Comfort

During the biting-fly season we sort of let the garden get out of control.  Now that they've mostly abated, we were doing some weeding.

Sometimes when we're in the garden, we bring Godwin the Goose in with us.  She's elderly now (we
hatched her about 20 years ago) and normally lives in a pen.  But she likes to get out and have a change of view and nibble down the grass.

Then we got one of those sudden downpours.  Buckets of rain--soaked to the skin in seconds.  Bob started towards the goose to put her back in her pen so we could get into the house when it happened.  A flash of light, and a sharp crack.

We have a lot of tomato cages in the yard, many of the staked up with pieces of rebar.  There was also, for some reason known only to Bob, a very tall piece of rebar stuck in one of the beds.  There had been one day that he was going to take it down, but saw a dragonfly perched on it.  Dragonflies eat mosquitoes, so he decided to leave it up there for a hunting platform.

God bless the dragonflies, because I saw the lightening hit that rod, less than 20 feet from Bob.

At the time, we were too startled (and still getting soaked) to react--just grabbed the goose, put her away, and headed to the house to dry off.  It wasn't until later that it started hitting me that either of us could of easily been killed--even though Bob pointed out that with the metal fence around the garden, all the tomato cages, and various other pieces of rebar holding things up, we were in a sort of homemade Faraday cage.

Still . . . . .