Red Lightning

So, Deb and I were scheduled to leave between 1:00 and 2:00 yesterday afternoon. Surprisingly, we hit I70 about 5:15. This wasn't surprising because we were 3 to 4 hours behind schedule, but because we were ONLY 3 to 4 hours behind schedule. Deb is always, always late. Always. And, to add the good news, she called shortly before 1:00 to let me know how late she'd be. Ordinarily, I just hang around waiting til she shows. (She rarely answers her cell and almost never when she's late.)

So, we got off to a good start.

It takes about 5 hours to drive from KC to St. Louis. By dusk, we were watching the most fabulous lightning how I've ever seen. Hundreds and hundreds of strikes, most of it what we used to call heat lightning--waves of diffuse light rather than individual bolts. No rain and no thunder. The strikes were too far away for us to hear the thunder. As evening waned, lightning backlit the colors of the sunset so the flashes looked pink and purple and gold.

By the time darkness fell, the show got more dramatic. As we got closer, we began to see individual bolts. The biggest, brightest bolts I've ever seen, and each was of longer duration. We saw one bolt we felt sure hit something because it shimmered in the air for several seconds, trilling up and down from earth to sky. (This morning the STL news is full of the pictures of a historic church destroyed by lighting last night. ??)

We also saw red lighting. Stoplight red. Neon loosed in the sky. After the first bolt, we looked at each other in confusion and asked, "Did you see that? That red lighting?"

Later we saw a virtual starburst of red light in the distance. About 10 minutes after that burst, we began to hear thunder and 5 or 10 minutes after that drove into rain. Driving, streaming, pounding rain but hardly any lightning at that point. When we drove out of the rain about 20 minutes later, we started seeing lightning again, but the real show was over.

My bags had hardly hit the floor of the hotel room before I googled red lightning. Lots of theories, no real answers. If anyone knows anything definitive, be sure and leave a comment, would you? We did see discussions of "red sprites," those bursts of red light, so we know we didn't imagine it.

Silly me, initially I wanted to get here before dark. Thought it would be easier to find our way in an unknown area when we could see. And it would have been (especially because we were navigating construction-narrowed roads in driving rain), but we would have missed one of the most spectacular shows of our lives.

The Universe provdes, you know. It really does.