Photo courtesy of Jerry LeDoux

To begin with, you were mauled by a bear in 1990. That’s before you were struck by lightning.

Yeah, bad luck follows me. We were up in Arkansas, at a roadside park. My wife and I spotted what I had presumed were baby bears, digging in trash cans. So I got out and got some pictures, and saw they were hungry. I had a couple of those little Dolly Madison apple pies, cherry pies, you may know what I’m talking about—I went to the car and got one of them out, and gave it to one of them. A couple drops got on my leg, the bear licked at it, and when it stood up, I realized this is no baby. [Laughs] Oh, it bit me pretty good.

Slate magazine has a laundry list of your scars and injuries: there’s the mauling, a Purple Heart for taking three bullets in Vietnam, shooting your finger through with a nail gun, screwing—

I screwed my arm to a board.

Gah.

Oh yeah. Things happen, you know? A lot of it’s because of my inability to think occasionally. I get my good days and bad days.

Which brings us to the fact that you were struck by lightning.

Twice.

Twice? I thought it was only one time.

No, it was twice. Let’s put it this way: it was a shocking experience. I got over it; I had a lot of damage done, of course, but I’m over it.

The first time, it was August of 1999. I was working at a plant, and a real bad storm came through. We get some of our products from another plant, and it was struck. Lightning hit it. I had to go down there to close a valve, and as soon as I reached for it, lightning hit me. I was thrown several feet. It blew up my radios, cell phone, pager. Blew out some discs in my neck, my back, and I got a little brain damage from it. I had some burn marks on my pant legs, and the glue on the soles of my shoes came loose. It burned the liner in my hat. I had a stainless steel chain around my neck: it burned that into my chest. It did a little number on me.

It gave me a lot of memory problems, but I’m doing okay. Just imagine a computer: it has lots of penny circuits and wiring in it, and every wire has a coating. Now, a wire might be burnt, but the coating is still there. Everything looks normal, but the signals aren’t always going through. They need to be rerouted. In the same way, I’m constantly reprogramming myself.

Do you remember being struck?

It was the prettiest white light you could ever see. I didn’t hear any sound. And then my body went completely stiff. I felt myself coming off the ground. After that, I was confused and numb and couldn’t understand anything. It was very weird.

Did you have to go to the emergency room?

My wife brought me to a doctor, and he looked at me and said, “I don’t see anything wrong with you”—nobody around here has experience with lightning victims—“except that your heart has an irregular beat.” Not fibrillating, but close to it. They let me go back to work, but eventually a doctor in Lake Charles said, “You’ll never fully go back.” I wound up in semi-retirement, on Workman’s Comp. About a month later, I started having problems—my memory was going bad, and I couldn’t remember things I’d helped build. A lot of people didn’t realize the guys were covering for me: I’d go out to do a job, something I’d done seven days a week, and wouldn’t even recognize what the machine was. And after going back in for a further exam, they told my wife: “No ma’am, that man can’t work.”

Which is really awful luck.

Oh, just wait. In August of 2005, another August!—well. This stuff about being protected from lightning in a car?

Yeah?

Don’t believe it. I was coming back from the store, going around a curve near the schoolhouse, when lightning hit. I was in a Ford Focus, and I’m six foot one, touching metal and everything, and it got me again. Burned all the ceiling liner in the car, burned some of the electrical stuff.

That one I blanked out on. When I came to, I was parked sideways in the road. So: a little more damage, again.

It’s really difficult to imagine the odds of two close shaves. You probably know better than I do that lightning kills far less often than it strikes. It kills around 1 in 6 million people a year. But to be struck twice, and not be incapacitated?

Mm-hm. Your brain sends electrical impulses, you know, to make your heart work. You have a positive impulse and a negative impulse. If you’re hit when it’s switching from positive to negative, your heart stops. That’s what causes most lightning fatalities. Luckily, I got hit at a good moment, I suppose.

“Luckily” is right. Are you scarred?

I had blisters and have a few scars and whatnot, yeah. It blew discs out in my neck and back. I’ve got titanium plates, screws, and cages there. My left hip’s ball joint was spiderwebbed. I have numbness in my feet. Odds and ends. Once you’re hit, problems arise immediately, but as time goes on, you find you have other things going wrong. You wind up with a lifetime effect.

With all that titanium inside, you probably draw a lot of jokes about lightning rods.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, all the time. On the CB radio in my truck, some people call me “Lightning Rod,” some call me “Sparky.” [Laughs] All in fun, of course. But sometimes it’s hard to explain to someone how you feel about it all.

How do you feel about it? Do you feel lucky or unlucky, at the end of the day?

In a way, I consider myself extremely lucky. But with all the problems it gave me, I sometimes wish it had just done me in to start with. I look at it on the positive side, too. I’ve still got a life to live, and even though you’re in pain all the time, and even though you get confused and lose days that you can’t remember, you keep trying. My wife just bought me a GPS to put in the truck, so when I get turned around, it’s programmed for ‘Home.’ I push the button and it gets me there.

It’s a good century to live in.

[Laughs] Yeah.

Being struck, though: you’d have to live it to really understand it. I belong to the LSESSI, Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International, and we have meetings once a year. Hundreds and hundreds of us go, mainly men. People that have been injured, from lightning or electrocution. We all have something in common, and having something in common we can actually relate to each other. Talk about what’s been going on, how we feel, our problems, which other people don’t understand. If you haven’t walked in someone’s shoes, you don’t know.

Funny things happen, and it gets rough. But I’m still waking up every morning, going about my business.

Do you think there’s any possibility of being struck a third time? Or is the sky more or less done with you.

I’ve got a 99% chance of getting hit again.

Come again?

Well, the organization tells us that once you’ve been hit once, you’ve got a 99% chance of getting hit again. There’s something about our bodies, certain people: we put out a kind of positive, or negative, something about us. We stand a better chance of getting hit again than someone else.

I’ve never heard that before. It seems like the chances would be slimmer.

I didn’t believe it either. I thought, once, and it’s over with. At one of the meetings they told me, and I laughed it off.

Five years later, bam.

And in a car. Roy Sullivan, who you’re probably familiar with—struck seven times in his life, holds the Guinness World Record—he was struck in a car, too. Several times. He even carried a container of water in his truck to put out his hair with, if it caught fire. Which it did, more than once.

Yeah, he was a Park Ranger. We have men and women in the LSESSI who have been hit multiple times, too, and to hear them tell their stories, it really makes you sit back and think about it.

But what gets me most is that when lightning comes around, I’m attracted to it.

Really?

I want to see it, and sometimes I want to reach out and touch it. My wife doesn’t understand that, but I am mentally attracted to it. It scares the daylights out of me, but I’m attracted to it. It’s still pretty.

You must have an affinity for it. And vice versa.

It’s hard to explain, but I do.

Click here for more on this topic.