desert

Our eldest grandson once dropped a lightning strike in our kitchen. It broke as it hit the table top. Shattered in fact. I’d brought the lightning strike home in a bottle some twenty years before. A plastic bottle, stuffed with toilet paper to protect the delicate lightning strike. An age-old message in a new-age bottle. An untold story found on the shores of a lake dying in an incoming tide of sand. Our ten year-old grandson was very uneasy after the accident, looking in horror at the shards of lightning that lay on the table. It was a lightning strike that had been recorded in sand, its heat creating a vitreous memory with a dendritic shape that mapped the path of the electrical discharge. A very elegant and tactile artefact, a fossilised lightning strike known as a fulgurite. I found this one at the base of very small dune somewhere north of Lake Chad. I’d seen what appeared to be broken twigs lying on the surface. I was curious since I’d not seen any plants for hours and KB stopped the Land Cruiser for a closer look. I’d never seen fulgurites before but I knew of them so maybe this was a lightning strike and worth keeping. Whether recent or older than the ancient trade routes that criss-crossed this desert, who could say. And so I picked it up and it made its way into a just-emptied water bottle after being wrapped in some of the emergency toilet paper we kept in the 4×4. And thence, eventually, it came to Ireland. And for the sake of our grandson, I’m pleased to say that I brought home more than one. And he was relieved to know that too.