Tis the season for thunder and lightning rolling out of the mountains and onto the prairie. Farmers always hope that those thunder and lightning storms will come with no hail. Everyone hopes those storms will come with no funnel clouds.
Last week I got to thinking about thunder and lightning storms I have been involved with or heard about. Some are just plain wonderful. Others lead to great tragedies and as a result are nightmares from hell.
I was reading the Media Report last week from the Chouteau County Sheriff’s office. The report said that an automobile had been hit by lightning and disabled and the people in the car had to be checked out at the hospital. That is a rare hit. Most of the time automobiles are very well grounded from lightning hits. But not always.
When I was a teenager, my father and I were visiting at Black’s cabin in Greenough Gulch on Clear Creek when a lightning storm came rolling through the canyon one afternoon. All of a sudden the lightning hit the tin chimney of a trash burner stove in the kitchen and when it got to the lids on the stove, it produced a loud snap, some flames and a strong ozone smell all over the house. That was the closest I had ever come to being hit by lightning.
My mother said that when she was a teenage girl, there was a neighbor boy who was riding his horse over to their farm just south of Havre on the bench between Beaver Creek and Bull Hook Creek. In the middle of a lightning storm, he got off his horse to open a gate and was struck by lightning and killed on the spot!
Grandma Lucke always said that the worst lightning storms she ever had heard of were on Clear Creek at the Minnie Rudd homestead where the Fuglevand cabin is today. Several times they had so much lightning on that corner that her knitting needles got hot.
Whenever I was ensconced at a Bear Paw cabin, I loved to hear the thunder and see the lightning storms that seemed to always come over the mountains from the Missouri and head north. In the mountains the thunder and lightning always seemed more extreme than on the prairie and always very exciting!
The strangest experience of all in a thunder and lightning storm was when a funnel cloud accompanied a very strong storm down the Clear Creek valley passing right behind the Lucke cabin at Henderson Creek.
One thing you should know about this cabin is that it had an outhouse with a beautiful view looking up the valley. Matter of fact the view was so beautiful that no one ever put a fourth wall on the outhouse. It was simply wonderful to do your business while admiring the scenery all around.
When a tornado came down the Clear Creek valley, it missed the cabin but hit the outhouse, which unfortunately had an employee of the Lou Lucke Company in it. He went up in the air around thirty feet, then on a strong air jet, came down several hundred yards away but none the worse for his ride on a tornado. They only comment he made was that from then on, the outhouse should be equipped with a seat belt just in case that ever happened again!
