The rain didn't let up until morning, and the thunder and lightning kept rolling through. We didn't have hammocks set up for everyone, but some of us doubled up, and everyone got off the ground to ride out the storm.

As an added bonus, we had rain flies over them, a comfort the privy didn't have. We briefly considered a wooden backwoods privy (basically a toilet on a platform over a hole in the ground) because at least it was off the ground, but we soon realized that those of us in the hammocks had been safe. The booming thunder and the lightning flashes kept coming, and we had to figure out the safest place to be. We didn't have time to contemplate our good fortune for more than a few seconds. My 6-year-old got a strong zap to the shoulder where I'd been touching him. A puddle surrounded the rocks his dad, who was standing close by but on the ground rather than the rocks, did get hit, but my son didn't feel a thing. My ten-year-old had been standing on the ring of rocks around the campfire pit. My daughter hadn't either, and my 8-year-old, who had been reading in another hammock just up a small bank, had received only a small zap on his rear end, which was brushing the ground because his nylon hammock had sagged a bit. Yet, when my husband got the baby out of the tent, he was fine. I have no words to describe what I felt as I looked at that tent and heard only the sounds of the rain and the thunder, but no crying, and as my eyes moved to the hammock where my 2-year-old daughter had been napping on the other side of the same puddle. My eyes went immediately to the tent where my baby had been napping-the tent that was now in the middle of a small-room-sized, inches-deep puddle. Through the deafening sounds of the pouring rain, I heard my husband shout, 'Are you OK?' I found that I was several feet from my son's hammock I must have leapt or been thrown away when the bolt struck me. Then it was over, and I wasn't dead, although I couldn't move my right arm below my elbow. I heard my own screams, understood that I was being electrocuted, and thought I was probably going to die. What I remember most is the explosive pain in my right forearm, as though millions of darts were trying to shoot out of my skin. The lightning must have traveled from the water-logged ground through my feet. Not directly, or I probably wouldn't be here to tell you about it. I bent to lightly touch his shoulder as I assured him that we were safe from lightning under tree cover: we were not the tallest thing around, not near anything metal, and not out on the open water of the Vermont reservoir where my husband and I and our five children were camping. I found my 6-year-old trembling beneath his magazine in his hammock. We already had a tarp set up over our fire pit, so my son and husband tried to get a fire going while I went to check on the other kids. Within minutes, puddles of water were everywhere, and no firewood in the forest was remotely dry. Once there, we had just enough time to scramble up the bank and under tree cover to our campsite before the heavens opened up. My 10-year-old son and I could already hear thunder as we paddled our kayaks furiously to shore.

Current lightning strikes