A Match to the Heart

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS A MATCH TO THE HEART

Gretel Ehrlich is the author of
The Solace of Open Spaces,
the novel
Heart Mountain,
and a collection of essays,
Islands, the Universe, and Home.

Praise for A Match to the Heart

“Harrowing, amusing, unforgettably vivid ... Ehrlich is a compulsive connector of the physical to the mystical.... Her contemplation of storms-their anatomy, behavior and power—is gripping, as she ponders the scale of what befell her.”
-Chicago Tribune

 
“A Match to the Heart is
opulent stuff ... wonderfully evocative. ... [Ehrlich] writes movingly of ... the world with the vision of a mystic and the ecological consciousness of a naturalist.”

—New
York Newsday

 
“A Match to the Heart
is in many ways the ultimate study of humans and nature, when what's outside suddenly forces its way inside.”

 
“Like the title suggests, [Ehrlich] holds up a light to illuminate her own condition. The Buddhist in her gives us a thoughtful meditation on the state of suspension between life and death. The reporter in her shines a light on the science, myth and medicine of lightning.”

—
Rocky Mountain News

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,
Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank,Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 
First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995

 

 
Copyright © Gretel Ehrlich, 1994

All rights reserved

 
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission
to reprint previously published material:

 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from “The Birth
place” from Station Island by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1985 by Seamus Heaney.
Rights outside the U.S. administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted
by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
Inc. and Faber and Faber Limited.

 
New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “Letter of Testimony”
from A Tree Within by Octavio Paz, copyright © 1988 by Octavio Paz.
.

eISBN : 978-0-140-17937-8

1. Ehrlich, Gretel-Health. 2. Electrical injuries—Patients—Biography
3. Lightning-Health aspects-Casc studies. I. Title.
RD96.5.E37 1994
617.1-22—dc20
[B]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank all those who gave help, care, and friendship in a time of need. Heartfelt thanks to my parents, Grant and Gretchen Ehrlich, who saved me, cared for me, and gave moral support and new friendship in our late years; to Dr. Blaine Braniff, healer, teacher, and companion extraordinaire; to Dick and Dorothy Roberts for making their plane available; to the doctors and nurses at Santa Barbara Cardiovascular Group; to the nurses in the Coronary Care Unit at Cottage Hospital; to Dr. Mary Cooper whose medical literature on lightning injury has helped us all; to Dr. Rick Westerman, thoracic surgeon, who let me watch; and to all those at the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock conference who told me their stories. Thanks to friends, old and new, whose cheer brightened long nights and days, especially Sue Davies and David Buckland; Patrick Markey, Bob Redford, Theresa Curtain, and Carol Fontana; Tamara Asseyev, Noel and Judy Young, Hillary Hauser and Jim Marshall, Kate and Clyde Packer, Jim Cresson, Marshall and Heidi Rose, Laurel Miller, Aaron Young, Pico Iyer, and Michael Ross; to Naomi Seeger for help with medical research; to my agent, Liz Darhansof
_f
; to my various editors and publishers: Michael Jacobs, Al Silverman, Paul Slovak, and my editor, Dan Frank; and, last but not least, my canine friends and guides, Rusty, French Fry, Yaki, and, especially, Sam.

Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?
We come back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:
birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth
like unstacked iron weights
afloat among galaxies.

-Seamus Heaney

 
... a witch who escapes human
detection will nevertheless
eventually be struck down by
lightning.
-Clyde Kluckhohn,
Navaho Witchcraft
(1944)

chapter 1

Deep in an ocean. I am suspended motionless. The water is gray. That's all there is, and before that? My arms are held out straight, cruciate, my head and legs hang limp. Nothing moves. Brown kelp lies flat in mud and fish are buried in liquid clouds of dust. There are no shadows or sounds. Should there be? I don't know if I am alive, but if not, how do I know I am dead? My body is leaden, heavier than gravity. Gravity is done with me. No more sinking and rising or bobbing in currents. There is a terrible feeling of oppression with no oppressor. I try to lodge my mind against some boundary, some reference point, but the continent of the body dissolves ...

 
A single heartbeat stirs gray water. Blue trickles in, just a tiny stream. Then a long silence.

 
Another heartbeat. This one is louder, as if amplified. Sound takes a shape: it is a snowplow moving grayness aside like a heavy snowdrift. I can't tell if I'm moving, but more blue water flows in. Seaweed begins to undulate, then a whole kelp forest rises from the ocean floor. A fish swims past and looks at me. Another heartbeat drives through dead water, and another, until I am surrounded by blue.

 
Sun shines above all this. There is no pattern to the way its glint comes free and falls in long knives of light. My two beloved dogs appear. They flank me like tiny rockets, their fur pressed against my ribs. A leather harness holds us all together. The dogs climb toward light, pulling me upward at a slant from the sea.

 
I have been struck by lightning and I am alive.

chapter 2

Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground, before “streamers” jumped the positive charge back up from ground to cloud, before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking.

When I started out on foot that August afternoon, the thunderstorm was blowing in fast. On the face of the mountain, a mile ahead, hard westerly gusts and sudden updrafts collided, pulling black clouds apart. Yet the storm looked harmless. When a distant thunderclap scared the dogs, I called them to my side and rubbed their ears: “Don't worry, you're okay as long as you're with me.”

 
 
I woke in a pool of blood, lying on my stomach some distance from where I should have been, flung at an odd angle to one side of the dirt path. The whole sky had grown dark. Was it evening, and if so, which one? How many minutes or hours had elapsed since I lost consciousness, and where were the dogs? I tried to call out to them but my voice didn't work. The muscles in my throat were paralyzed and I couldn't swallow. Were the dogs dead? Everything was terribly wrong: I had trouble seeing, talking, breathing, and I couldn't move my legs or right arm. Nothing remained in my memory—no sounds, flashes, smells, no warnings of any kind. Had I been shot in the back? Had I suf fered a stroke or heart attack? These thoughts were dark pools in sand.

The sky was black. Was this a storm in the middle of the day or was it night with a storm traveling through? When thunder exploded over me, I knew I had been hit by lightning.

The pain in my chest intensified and every'muscle in my body ached. I was quite sure I was dying. What was it one should do or think or know? I tried to recall the Buddhist instruction regarding dying—which position to lie in, which direction to face. Did the “Lion's position” taken by the Buddha mean lying on the left or the right? And which sutra to sing? Oh yes, the Heart Sutra ... gate, gate, paragate ... form and formlessness. Paradox and cosmic jokes. Surviving after trying to die “properly” would be truly funny, but the chances of that seemed slim.

Other words drifted in: how the “gateless barrier” was the gate through which one passes to reach enlightenment. Yet if there was no gate, how did one pass through? Above me, high on the hill, was the gate on the ranch that lead nowhere, a gate I had mused about often. Now its presence made me smile. Even when I thought I had no aspirations for enlightenment, too much effort in that direction was being expended. How could I learn to slide, yet remain aware?

To be struck by lightning: what a way to get enlightened. That would be the joke if I survived. It seemed important to remember jokes. My thinking did not seem connected to the inert body that was in such terrible pain. Sweep the mind of weeds, I kept telling myself-that's what years of Buddhist practice had taught me.... But where were the dogs, the two precious ones I had watched being born and had raised in such intimacy and trust? I wanted them with me. I wanted them to save me again.

It started to rain. Every time a drop hit bare skin there was an-explosion of pain. Blood crusted my left eye. I touched my good hand to my heart, which was beating wildly, erratically. My chest was numb, as if it had been sprayed with novocaine. No feeling of peace filled me. Death was a bleakness, a grayness about which it was impossible to be curious or relieved. I loved those dogs and hoped they weren't badly hurt. If I didn't die soon, how many days would pass before we were found, and when would the scavengers come? The sky was dark, or was that the way life flew out of the body, in a long tube with no light at the end? I lay on the cold ground waiting. The mountain was purple, and sage stirred against my face. I knew I had to give up all this, then my own body and all my thinking. Once more I lifted my head to look for the dogs but, unable to see them, I twisted myself until I faced east and tried to let go of all desire.

 
 
When my eyes opened again I knew I wasn't dead. Images from World War II movies filled my head: of wounded soldiers dragging themselves across a field, and if I could have laughed—that is, made my face work into a smile and get sounds to discharge from my throat—1 would have. God, it would have been good to laugh. Instead, I considered my options: either lie there and wait for someone to find me—how many days or weeks would that take?—or somehow get back to the house. I calmly assessed what might be wrong with me—stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, gunshot wound - but it was bigger than I could understand. The instinct to survive does not rise from particulars; a deep but general misery rollercoasted me into action. I tried to propel myself on my elbows but my right arm didn't work. The wind had swung around and was blowing in from the east. It was still a dry storm with only sputtering rain, but when I raised myself up, lightning fingered the entire sky.