There is nothing, nothing in the world like the smell—the taste—of burnt, fried air. Oxygen rent asunder, recombining into acrid, unstable ozone. Because air is all around you always, it feels like the whole planet has been singed. Like the world has been left too long on an overheated griddle.

I'll always remember every sensation of those seconds right after the lightning blast. Time seemed to stop, just for a few moments, and there was nothing but an overload of sensations, from me and all around me.

I sure don't remember the event itself. I was running through Sugar Creek Park, trying to get to my bike so I could pedal the hell out of what looked like a monsoon brooding over the next county and headed this way faster than a cheetah with a grudge. I was pounding across the sheep meadow when I tripped on a root. It must have taken a half a second for me to fall on my face, but during that half-second the storm overtook me and hurled an overchanged lightning bolt at me so powerful it would have sent Marty McFly back to the dawn of time.

This lightning bolt was immense, bigger than ten of the normal kind. Quite apart from what it did to me (which nobody knows anyway) it built for itself enough of a legend that people still talk about it. I remember sitting in a diner just outside the park, hardly a hundred yards from the spot, a few days after the storm. The dried-up old bean of a waitress behind the counter was telling a passing businessman, and everyone in earshot, how she'd seen the lightning bolt out the window of her double-wide and, because it was so huge and so bright, she'd been sure it was an H-bomb going off. She'd actually convinced herself she'd gone blind looking at it, just like you're supposed to when you look directly at a nuclear blast, and had run screaming through her home raving about World War III. All the time I'd sat quiet and unnoticed at the end of the counter, nursing my coffee, wondering what the hell kind of world I lived in.

But it was from the talk of locals like Doris (the duck-and-cover biddie behind the counter) that I learned what little I was able to find out about the blast in the first few days after it happened. My own memory contained only the mad dash across the meadow, the trip, the split second in mid-air like I was flying, and then whiteness, like overexposed film. I came to shortly afterward, sprawled on the ground, with time stopped and the world feeling like it was spinning slowly, the wrong way. The smell and taste of charred air and earth. Eyes, mouth and skin all painfully dry.

I was in a daze for hours, even as I went through the motions of struggling to my feet, limping the rest of the way across the meadow, and (the most stunningly stupid thing I've ever done) climbing onto my bike and riding it, unsteadily and with little awareness of the cars and people around me. I pedaled hard throgh my own little gray, misty world, until I realized I was sprawled in a strange gravel driveway, my bike at my feet, my elbows scraped raw and the knees of my jeans ripped open. It was only then that it began to dawn on me, dimly, that I shouldn't have been alive at all, and to wonder why I was. I should have been dead, yet I survive a lightning blast unscathed, only to bang myself up in a fall from my own bike.

The storm had broken. I had been riding for some time in drenching rain, and it was still coming down in buckets. I glanced around, unsure where I was. The house looked like one of the abandoned farmhouses outside of town with the peeling paint and the windows boarded up. The lawn had grown wild; a shaggy juniper bush seemed poisted to topple the house. Across the drive, a dilapidated barn yawned empty.

I felt a pang of fear. What the hell was going on with me? Why had I gotten myself all the way out here, on completely the wrong end of town?

I still wasn't thinking clearly. I could barely remember the bike ride at all: it was a miasma of swerving cars, headlights, horns. I'd cheated death not once but twice. I saw "Final Destination." Death doesn't like to be cheated. I half expected the storm to toss a tractor on me at any minute.

I dragged my bike into the otherwise empty barn and stood there in the dark and dank. I was suddenly awake, my heart pounding, my flesh tingling. I was soaking wet and chilled to the bone, yet I began to feel unaccountably hot, and restless. My tee shirt and jeans had apparently shrunk in the rain. They felt unaccountably tight. My sneakers too. I kicked them off and peeled off my wet clothes and cast them aside in a heap. That restless, tingling feeling was getting worse. I felt jazzed, like I'd had a hundred cups of coffee, and it was getting more and more intense. Unbearably intense. I felt like I was plugged in, like a power line was shooting through my nervous system. Finally I threw back my head and shrieked, a long tearing scream that somehow purged me of all that power. I felt it leave me in two great shock waves so massive, so overwhelming, I remember thinking that now I knew how it felt to be an exploding star. I was breathing hard and exhausted. My heart was pounding like a jack-hammer. It was going so fast all I could think for a few moments was that I was going to die from sudden coronary failure. Slowly, gradually, it calmed down, and I allowed myself to listen to the alarm bells in my head.

The alarms were telling me I was experiencing sensations I definitely shouldn't have been. I knew in an instant what the wrong sensations were.

Cold, hard rain was pummeling my naked body.

I'd been looking inward for several moments, but now with a wave of cold dread I opened my eyes. Before me lay a scene of devastation. The barn was almost completely destroyed. A few shards of wall stood upright at a crazy angle, but everything else was kindling. The barn was flattened. It was flattened in a pattern that was so disturbing my vision went white for a space. I nearly went mad in that moment. It passed painfully, leaving roiling dread that seemed to be twisting my intestines.

My vision cleared. Almost inevitably I turned in a slow circle to observe the whole effect. The effect was a barn-flattening blast radiating, in a perfect circle, from the exact spot on which I stood. Nothing was left but charred remains, still smoking and sizzling in the unrelenting rain. My clothes were completely gone, probably incinerated. The floor, I noticed for the first time, was cement—good thing, too (I thought later), since a wooden floor would have gone the was of the blast and I might have fallen straight through to the storm cellar, breaking my leg, or my neck, or God knows what.

(That night on the news, I'm told, the weatherman expressed amazement that a tornado had touched down during a spring thunderstorm like this one. It was out of season and the wrong kind of storm for funnel clouds, he assured his listeners, and it was quite a mystery where the "freak tornado" had come from. When I heard this story I must admit I was a little rankled and took the phrase "freak tornado" a bit too personally, but later on I was able to be amused by it. I even used it once as an alias—but I'm getting ahead of my story.)

I raised my eyes, shielding them from the rain with my hand. The first thing I saw was the roof of the barn. The roof had been blown off and had rocketed into the fallow wheat fields beyond the house, bursting on impact into a million pieces. The house was pretty much intact, except for the nearest corner, which had sustained heavy damage. The few remaining windows were blown out.

In that moment the most terrifying thought of my life hit me so hard I think I actually checked out for a few minutes, because shortly thereafter I came to, collapsed to my knees and was sobbing in the rain, a flood of tears draining immediately into the rivulets of rainwater streaming down my face. The thought was: What if I had gone home?

It was a short path from that thought to the next: I can't go home.

The rain had turned cold, and I was starting to shiver. I stood up, feeling awkward and ungainly. Headlights pierced the stormy gloom: the country road was just at the bottom of the hill. An ancient, weather-beaten old pickup truck labored into view, clambering over the rough road as it fought off the unslackening deluge.

Unreasoning fear gripped me. I had to run, or I would be caught and blamed for all the damage. I pictured myself, a 17-year old kid, hauled into caught in front of the whole town on charges of blowing things up. Would it be worse if they thought I had a bomb—or if they knew I was the bomb?

I took off, into the woods, away from the unhappy pickup, away from town, away from everything. I ran for a long time, until I was too tired to run any more. But that took hours and hours to happen. I was the original gym class nerd who got winded during the 100-yard dash, but here I was, running hard and tirelessly, long into the night, without even a sidestich or a need to pause and catch my breath. I ran and ran and ran, and kept my mind firmly switched off. I let what I saw wash over me, subsume me, just for now. Trees (branches cracking underfoot, but my feet were never hurt)—birches and oaks and a few conifers; trees giving way to fields again: first old, fallow fields, then worked fields, new crops beaten down by the heavy storm; then country (wild fields of fireweed and Queen Anne's lace) which began to roll, first gently, then dramatically, until I realized I was sprinting up the high-piled ridges that, all my life, had been little more than a purple smudge on the horizon.

I slowed to a halt near the top of one of the ridges. I had been following a hiking path, but of course no one was out in this weather (the rain had let up, most of the storm having moved on, but it was still misting, and ominous clouds obscured part of the night sky). I felt the edges of a sweet fatigue stealing over me as I slowly walked the rest of the way up the muddy path to the observation deck.

At first I could see little from the high platform: it was deep in a dark, cloudy night; but the moon emerged occasionally, and my eyes adjusted so that after a moment or two it seemed as thought I was looking out over a valley settling into early twilight. Straight down below me, and startling far away, was my little town, Torrence, twinkling with its little lights. It looked so small it might have passed for a medieval hamlet, were it not for the "strip," which I could see from here—outside of town, along the state highway, was a long swatch of neon lights still glaring brightly at this ungodly hour. There, you could get twelve different kinds of fast food hamburgers and at least five brands of greasy tacos. I'd spent many a happy afternoon there, but I'd never seen it from this angle. It looked garish and unnatural next to the sleeping town it serviced.

Beyond Torrence the valley rose up again in ridges like the ones I was standing on. Further down the valley was a bigger town, Mooresville, partly hidden by the shoulder of the ridge I'd climbed. My heart sank as I again thought that Torrence was closed to me now. If I went anywhere, I'd have to head down-valley to Mooresville. But what would I be able to do there? If I blew up a neighborhood in Mooresville, would that be O.K. because they were all strangers there?

Sad, angry, and self-reproachful, but more than anything else feeling unquenchably alone, I sat down at one of the picnic tables and hid my head in my arms.

Continued in Shockwaves 2