High Voltage
23 Jul 2020Today’s prompt: “Getting hit by lightning”
Back when I was a reporter at a community newspaper, we all had to take our turn taking weekend shifts. When you took a weekend shift, it didn’t matter what beat you normally covered – you would cover whatever news happened on the weekend. I was a business reporter, but got to provide color for a menudo cooking contest, cover reactions to the Columbia space shuttle disaster, and interview a mother on the day her daughter’s murderer, who had gone on the lam, was found and brought to justice. All because I happened to be working that weekend.
On your typical weekend shift, unless you were covering a pre-planned event, you would roll in around 3 p.m. and start making calls to all the local emergency services to see if any news had broken while you were out. So one weekend, I rolled in and made my call to the Nampa Police Department. Nothing of import, they said. I called the Caldwell Police Department. Nothing going on, they said. Then I called the Nampa Fire Department.
No fires, the person answering the phone said. But had I talked to the Nampa P.D. about that escaped alligator?
Why no, they hadn’t mentioned it to me, I said.
Yeah, the guy from the fire department said. And you might want to ask the Caldwell P.D. about the guy who was struck by lightning.
Really, I said.
So I called back the Nampa Police Department and asked about the alligator. Oh yeah, the guy said. There was that. Turned out he was pretty new to giving out police blotter type information. I had to coach him through the kinds of information he could give out.
Okay, so what time did it happen? I asked. He told me.
And what city block did it take place on? He was confused. I told him, most police blotter information, they tell you if it happened on, say, the 700 block of 12th Avenue, or the 1400 block of Nectarine.
Oh, he said. It was on the 1820 block of whatever the street it was, I can’t remember. I’m making up that number, too. Thing is, in general, a dispatcher will tell you the 1800 block, not the 1820 block. The 1820 block is often like four houses.
I jotted down that information and then went to the neighborhood with a photographer and started knocking on doors. No answer at the first door. The second door we tried was the house.
I explained to the homeowners who we were and what we’d heard and they were quite eager to point out the fence that the baby alligator had crawled under. My photographer got pics over the fence of the kiddie pool the alligator normally stayed in with the family’s father pointing at it, while I interviewed the mother. Her kids had been playing in the backyard. She was in the house on the phone. The alligator had crawled under the fence while the kids were playing by themselves in the sandbox. They kicked some sand at it, and then one of them ran in to get their mom. Mom saw the alligator and freaked. The fuck. Out.
The episode turned into a four-day saga. The next day, we found out that the couple across the fence had been watching the alligator for a friend, but were arrested while he was gone, so the (again, baby, maybe four feet long but almost certainly would not have eaten those kids) alligator got hungry and ventured out. I wrote a story on exotic animal ordinances in the area. And I was able to cover the reunion of the alligator with its owner, at which time I finally found out the alligator’s name. It was Steve.
I also called the Caldwell Police Department that first day on the weekend and wrote a brief about the man who was struck by lightning. All the basics. Name if they’d announced it yet, I don’t remember. Where he was at the time and what he was doing (construction work, I think). Doing all right in the hospital, as I recall.
Your death by lightning strike, I’m sad to say, was similarly eclipsed by a wild moose attack that left two in the hospital. What can I say? The news loves an animal story.