There were no Independence Day festivities scheduled at the school. The fourth of July was clear and bright. You couldn't have guessed in the afternoon of a storm of such destructive magnitude approaching, which is how it turned out that evening.

Audrey was away visiting her parents, who'd moved to Salt Lake City. MacDougall was in a field behind our cabin, painting dear young Lizzie. The two of them, painter and model, were both getting bad sunburns. Late in the afternoon into early evening, the three of us ate mulligatawny stew then cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink to soak. I offered to drive Lizzie home, but she insisted she wanted to share a little of the beautiful evening with us. We made sure all the candles were out, and went for a walk.

We strolled lackadaisically, in silence, enjoying the mild evening air. Atop a hill, we watched the shimmering veil of stars and a distant show of fireworks. Soaring flares illuminated the valley. Then we saw it was not fireworks lighting the sky, but a storm rolling in. There was a flash -- wham! Lightning, followed by a crack of thunder so loud and close it made me wince. The rain began pouring down. We turned back, running, with lightning tearing through the sky, the thunder rumbling up through the canyon behind us.

Back at the cabin, we could have gone swimming. Lizzie had left water running in the sink and the sink's plug was doing its job perfectly, plugging the drain pipe. There was no precaution drain. The sink was, beyond being full, flowing over. It had obviously been doing so for while. The excess water ran over the brim like liquid glass. The kitchen floor was a flat, glistening lake of water. Paintings, paints, corks, plastic cups, and even MacDougall's top hat floated on the waters. It was painful to see. MacDougall turned the water off. I lighted a lantern and went to the fuse-box to switch off the electricity. We followed Lizzie out of the house to stand under a tree where, even in the rain, it was drier. Then came the jolt.

The sky split itself open like two colliding asteroids. It stood my hair on end. Lizzie stood perfectly still, regarding a fiery, fuzzy, strange orb, about the size of a basketball, hovering over a small pine tree. Suddenly, there was a hissing sound. Then the thing went ZIIIIIIIIP! and shot high and fast into the air and, KA-WhaAAAAAM!, blew itself to smithereens. The pine tree exploded. The dishes in the kitchen sink blew up and Lizzie's fated lightning bolt flew right to her. The soft, radiant glow of Saint Elmo's Fire was all around the cabin. There was nothing we could do.

Lizzie's father knew all about such phenomena, but he wouldn’t talk to us. It was not Jake who explained to us how Lizzie had died. It was an older man, a stranger to us, who came to haul away the dead tree. "First of all, " he said, "You got to understand a lightning bolt's got the electric current of about ten thouand electric chairs strapped together. One of them just passing by within an inch of your nose would set your hair on fire. If you get touched by one, you die. Just the air around a lightning bolt is six times hotter than the surface of the sun. And bolts fly at about ninety thousand miles a second, about half the speed of light, screaming shards of light ripping the sky wide open. It's like popping a brown paper bag with a ten pound sledge hammer."

"She died instantly?" MacDougall needed to know.

"I'd bet she did," the man affirmed.

"There's this extreme danger every time there's a thunderstorm?" MacDougall asked.

"It's amazing people aren't being tossed right and left," the old man said. "Though only about a fifth of all lightning bolts ever reach the ground -- about a hundred every second -- right around a million of 'em strike the planet any given day. To a lightning bolt, the earth is mother-lode. When a rod flies, you best not be standin' in the way. A bolt seeks the shortest, fastest passage to the ground. It's a a simple tag game -- if you're in the way, you're it. If that girl hadn't been the conduit, something else would'a been -- you boys, that bike, anything -- something.

"It knocked her shoes off her feet," I told him.

"I would guess," the man said.

"What happened to the kitchen dishes?" I asked.

"After hitting the tree and traveling down along its trunks to the roots," the man explained, "the lightning bolt went along under this here jerrybuilt house to its waterpipes and on up to your kitchen sink where it blew up your plates and glassware like a lightbulb at the center of a tornado."

After the funeral Edith Farber approached MacDougall and me and, obviously choosing her words carefully, she said she hoped she and her husband Jake would never lay eyes on the two of us again.