Poised, I stand arms spread to the heavens at the peak of Ben Macdui, naked as a mole rat, my fifty-two year old tadger flapping in the gale. Sideways rain lashes against my clenched arsecheeks and I feel the electricity in my bones bloom in-sync with the raging clouds above, their grey bellies pregnant with lightning and retribution. I am Zeus’ unwanted bastard and I am ready to forfeit my place on this shitty plane of improbable existence. My name was Rab Sanders but now I don’t need a name…Now I’m ready to reunite with the electromagnetic field. 

Years before this glorious moment, I’d lived a normal life. A quiet life perhaps, but normal. I was normal. Probably boring by most standards. You’d say morning to me and I’d say morning back. I drank tea and ate toast. I read the paper. Put it in the recycling after. Unwound with a few tins. Normal. So why, I hear you ask, might a man so ordinary be thirteen-hundred meters above sea level, goolies a’dangling, madness in the eyes, beckoning the sweet taste of thunder? I’ll tell you.

It started several years ago with my first incident. I’d just been by the rangers office and was making my way up Cairn Toul on the quad to assess a damaged walking path. A recent storm near enough washed it away – left a treacherous strip of mire behind. The last thing any ranger wants is a gaggle of Munro-bagging OAPs with twisted ankles needing airlifted back to their envoy of Honda Jazzs. Plus the heli team is a troupe of weapons-grade pricks. I became a ranger so I didn’t have to deal with people like that but turns out they’re endemic, tarnishing your sacred spaces with their Pure Gym biceps and facial hair that’s so lovingly pruned that it’d impress a Chelsea Flower Show judge. I deliberately turned up early this morning so I could do the job myself. My eagerness to fix the path had me gleefully zooming by pine and heather feeling the spray of light October rain, like god was blowing a raspberry in my face with aw wee bits of spittle. The quad rumbles pleasantly beneath my cheeks as I traverse the magical topography of the Cairngorms and I feel integrated, like I’m just as much a part of everything as everything else. Birch, aspen, red squirrel, willow, Rab.

I reach the path at eight-hundred meters elevation and gawk at the chocolatey smear that was once a helpful footpath. Thunder rumbles in the distance as I take stock of the open canopy above me and turn off the ignition. I’m gonna get wet but I dinny mind. In fact I like it. The high drama of doing something urgently in the rain fills me with a honking-great sense of masculinity and now I’m untying the shovel from the quad’s rack like a Grecian hero readying for the coliseum. I’m like Hercules of the hills, I think to myself. I’m Hill-cules. I create an outline in the soft mud where the new path will go and I begin to dig. It’s physical work and soon enough the lactic acid starts to build but Hill-cules won’t be slowed by such trivialities.  

Twenty-five minutes of graft pass by and I’m sopping wet. What’s rain and what’s sweat doesny matter. I’m so embroiled in hacking at the earth that I didny notice just how treacherous the skies above me had become. Even the rumble of thunder didny reach my ears over the sound of my own Wimbledonian grunts. I’m trying to chew the edge of the shovel through a stubborn root and I’m nearly through. One final strike’ll do it. The winds screamed by. I lift the metal shovel above my head ready to bring it down with all my might. A thunderclap. For a snapshot flicker of an instant a flash illuminates everything around me. And then it hit me. A bolt of lightning connected with my shovel faster than I could process and its earth-bound voltage bull-rushed its way down the shaft into my arm and throughout my body. It felt like every individual cubic centimetre of my body was kicked by a coked-up premier racehorse. It felt like getting hit by a speeding heavy goods vehicle with a front grill made of molten hell-metal. It felt like I’d been hit by a hundred-million volts of Benjamin Franklin’s cucked fury. I’d been hit by lightning. Fuck sake. 

I woke up in a half backflip tangled in a juniper, disoriented to fuck with the acrid smell of burnt man in my nostrils. My right arm was locked up in spasm, boiled and blistered, stinging like all hell. My whole body raced with pain. My face was a hot pink part due to the extreme physical strain and part due to being lightly cooked. My eyebrows and moustache had been totally scorched from the heat leaving me with a look of shabby astonishment like a tramp watching street magic. I limped slowly back to the quad trying to piece together some semblance of what had just happened. I spotted the black scorched shovel twenty feet away from where I’d been using it. Somehow, I was able to slump my body over the quadbike and fumble the key into the ignition. 

I trundled back to the ranger office, the storm having subsided and devolved into drizzle. Tam, my poisonously pleasant colleague, was waiting in the doorway in his stupid puffy jacket and he watched my slow approach. He toddled over with a mug of tea in hand and his face changed when he got a good look at me. “Get caught in that storm then eh, Rab?” 

“Looks like it, aye.” I said, static buzzing in my ears.

“Were you doing the path clear up Cairn Toul?”

“That I was.” He paused and squinted his wee eyes at me.

“You awright?”

“…Aye.” I lied.

“What happened to yer mustache?”

“Dinny ask, Tam.”

I made my way home, opened my front door and collapsed into a steaming heap where I lay for the next fifteen hours. I left a Rab-shaped stain of dirt and ash in the carpet I’ve still no been able to get out. I was amazed to find that beyond a few second-degree burns scattered about my torso and arms, I wasny too hurt. The only long-term effect of the strike had been some muscle damage to my right arm which’d cause it to seize up on occasion and shake. But I’d survived. I knew the odds of being hit by lightning were low but I didn’t want to know exactly how low. I didn’t want to have taken part in some freak incident of nature. I just wanted to keep my head down. Be unexceptional. But seemingly that wasny what the Fates had written for me. 

The second incident – yes, second incident – took place on Derry Cairngorm about a year later. There’s a body of water up Derry, around nine-hundred meters called Loch Etchachan. One of the UK’s highest named waters. Lovely spot. Even has trout. We’d had a bout of heavy rainfall and the conservationists asked we go and take some tests so I took the job and I was looking forward to it. It was early November so, expecting shit weather I took the Jeep and headed up just before sunrise. 

I got parked as close to the loch as I could get but had to hike the final few hundred meters. The rain was heavier than I’d expected so the views weren’t as good but looking out over the plateau of Carn Etchachan still got my heart thumping. It reminded me why I got into this kinda work. I made it to the water’s edge, put down my kit and took some time to just stare into the loch. If I looked hard enough through the rain-dappled shimmer of the water’s surface then I could make out the trout; sturdy wee spotted fellas. Spawning season had them all giddy and active. I felt it a shame that the trout could never understand how lucky they were to be so high up even though they couldny enjoy the view that surrounds them. The only time they’d get to experience it is if they got plucked out the waters by an osprey, which they often did. Then before their wee fishy-guy lives are about to end they’d see the glory of the land around them and go “oh wow, so this is the world. I was a part of this” only to be zipped open and have their guts tugged out by a beak. I stood staring wondering if I’d rather die an old trout never having known what lay beyond the threshold. I found that since the first incident my mind would often wander like this. 

When I came back to my senses some fifteen minutes later I noticed two things – firstly, the already dim morning seemed to have gotten darker and secondly, there was an unfamiliar high-pitched ringing developing in my ears. I gave both ears the old pinky-finger-waggle technique hoping to dislodge whatever might have been causing it but the sound kept growing and in the distance I heard a deep rumble. I better get a move on, I thought. I turned and bent down to pick up my kit when – flash – pause – white hot agony. A bolt had struck me in the back causing every damned muscle in my body to involuntarily tighten to its limit, stretching me taut over my own useless skeleton. I collapsed, my unevenly-moustached face hitting the pebble stones of the shoreline and for a good minute I uncontrollably convulsed, not unlike a caught and discarded brown trout about to expire. 

That incident was responsible for the crook in my neck. I could never quite straighten my posture all the way like I could before that day and I hated it. I felt folded and bent out of shape like an empty beer tin that’d been too roughly played with, its once smooth surface now pocked and dented. That ringing in my ears would randomly happen too, any time and anywhere. Tam noticed the change in my posture and kept asking if I needed a good chiro recommendation because his uncle knows a guy who can do the YouTube thing where they twist your neck and pull so it makes a sound like a KitKat Chunky getting snapped. The ringing often drowned him out and I’d just stare into space and let it. Two lightning strikes. Christ. Don’t tell me the odds, I just don’t care to know.

The third time was eight months later while I was leading a tour group up Beinn Bhreac. They were all adding their carefully selected stones to the cairn pile at the summit when I noticed those familiar dark clouds rolling in. My right arm seized, the high hum entered my ears and my back throbbed. Sweat started beading on my brow as my face went worried and red. “Right folks, let’s get moving. We don’t want to be caught out.” I knew it was coming. It defied all logic and probability but I just knew. “You lot start making your way back to the bothy, just down the hill there.” I ushered them back down the hill so they wouldn’t see what was about to happen to me. I could smell the lightning in the air like one of those sniffer dogs that’s been trained to smell prostate cancer in piss. Little good it did though. The dog can’t treat prostate cancer any more than I can stop what’s about to happen. I watched the final member of the group, eighty year old Ms. Chen, turn back to check on me before descending out of sight. I threw a double thumbs-up which she returned then I made a wee shooing motion with my hands to encourage her on. The indignity of the whole thing. I mean what kind of man lets himself get struck by lightning three times? What does that say about a man? Honestly, I’m not sure but it can’t be good. It was futile anyway because after a while they’d realise I hadn’t joined them and they’d find me in whatever sorry state I was destined for. 

The ringing in my ear is screaming now. I find a large flat boulder and all I can think to do is curl up into a wee ball and wait. Maybe if I lay still enough the gods won’t see me, I think to myself, stupidly. Curled up, now I’m just like any other stone up here, purposeless and dull, waiting out eternity. I try to think about one day becoming sand. But despite my best efforts to be a stone there’s an almighty crack and a flash and once again I’ve been chosen. Touched by the intangible zig-zag agony-arm of Mr. Tickle. I’m hit in the shoulder and I feel the surge travel up my neck and wrap my skull in a warm needley hug. I black out and eventually I wake up splayed across the flat bolder like pancake batter dropped on a shoe. My whole body thrums with pain but my head, it feels…different.

In the interest of brevity I’ll summarise the next few unlikely and hellish instances for you, shall I?

Number four: Three months later. In a rowboat in the middle of Loch Garten. Hit my left leg. I fell into the water and the residual charge from my body culled what the ecologists estimate to be around 40-50% of the European eel population. It was after this one that the TV in my house stopped working if I stood too close. I stopped fishing too.

Number five: Four months later. Up Braeriach sorting a loosened signpost. Tam found me unconscious and smouldering in a ditch. Now all the rangers and park staff know and have started calling me Rod which is just fucking charming. It was after this hit that my eyes went weird and I started seeing strange patterns in the air. Sometimes I could look into the sky and see all these atmospheric layers rolling and crashing into each other like waves on the sea. The question as to whether what I’m seeing is real or not never seemed worth answering. Oh and I can smell batteries from ten feet. They smell like limes.

Number six: Seven months later. Carrying my shopping back to my car and I was thunder-punched right in the chest. Apparently my heart had stopped before being defibrillated back to life by a twenty-two year old Aldi shift manager. Scorched more than half my shopping and they didn’t even offer a refund. So much residual current is present in my system by this point that when a friend dropped me off from the hospital in his electric car he was surprised to find it’d charged 8%. I wasny surprised. My mind is a forever churning fondue of static and I barely respond when people try to speak to me now. The world has just become a tangle of electrical signals to me. 

Number seven: Three months later. Carn Ban Mor. I wasny even meeting minimum requirements at work by this point but everyone was too scared to do anything. My body is a battered shambling frame and my mind can barely hold a thought longer than a few moments. I haveny confirmed it but I’m pretty sure I emit a quiet electrical hum like a pylon. I’m sitting on a rock around 900 meters watching waves of what could be infrared and ultraviolet ripple above the wild landscape. Clouds roll in, my body starts to buzz and ring and hurt and there’s no fight left in me. I lay back and stare into the underside of the darkening clouds overhead, imagining the pantheon of gods having a right giggle at my expense just beyond. Zap. 

Well, seven incidents brings us right up to date. When people had found out they’d say things like “that’s incredible – what are the odds?” or “Rab, you’re lucky to be alive”. To which I’d say things like “that’s a matter of perspective” and “go away”. Seven times defies any notion as simplistic as luck. Seven times tells me that there is something about the person I occupy that is destined to meld with a greater power. It tells me I’m being called home.

So here I stand. I’m naked as the day I was born at the summit of Ben Macdui in a violent thunderstorm. I believe it’s a Tuesday. I arc my crooked neck upwards as best I can to look into the belly of the clouds above and I see in brilliant clarity the dormant electricity in quickstep with the magnetic field. The way they dance together makes more sense to me now than any other form of interaction I’ve ever known. More so than a smile or a hug or touch on the arm. The high-hum in my ears has transcended pitch and audibility and I experience it now as pure vibration. It feels nice. Like that shopping centre massage chair I used once.  I smile and spread my arms letting the heavy rain drape over me as the atmosphere around me thickens. Thunder laughs overhead – ah ha ha ha ha! I laugh along. 

Oh aye, before I go, I just wanna be clear- I dinny tell my story because I want you to know how special I think I was. How lucky or blessed or exceptional my life in particular was. Just the opposite actually. You see, eventually curiosity got the better of me and I looked into the numbers. They reckon it’s ten-thousand to one to be hit by lightning once. When you multiply for seven times in one life then that number gains a bunch more zeroes. But see the chances of being born – the exact egg, the exact sperm, the exact parents, the exact conditions that lead to you – they reckon it’s around four-hundred trillion to one. I dunno how they worked that out but that’s absolutely loads’a zeroes as well. It makes me think that we’re all just riding a wave of massive improbability, with no idea how we got here and when we might be plucked from the waters, so I dunno – just don’t sweat it. 

The clouds are calling me now. Here comes my ride. 

I can’t remember what had prompted me to Google the most times one person had been hit by lightning but I can remember reading the results and being immediately obsessed with the notion. Roy Sullivan was a park ranger in Virginia and the poor guy had reportedly been hit seven times. SEVEN. His Wiki page outlines the individual instances but that’s all and it left me wondering about all the personal and interpersonal ways it must have affected his life. I mean, imagine being confronted not only with repeat near-death experiences but also ones that defy all odds of ever happening in the first place. How would that change the way you saw the world and your place in it? So that was the starting point for this piece. Further inspiration came from having recently read Blindboy’s wonderful short story collection, Topographia Hibernica, many of which stories are written with brilliantly integrated Irish dialect and slang to much humour and effect. So I decided to write something set in Scotland with a native protagonist POV who’d use the odd Scottish colloquialism. While researching Roy Sullivan I came across the short film inspired by his story, Don vs Lightning, which – would you believe it – was retold through a Scottish lens too. It seems this notion just fascinates us Scots, perhaps from some genealogical survival instinct to stay out of the rain…