Charge!

Last night, summer in Florida officially began. While the the calendar states June 20th as the first day of summer, I consider the first day of summer is when the first thunderstorm rolls in from the east. This is precisely what happened yesterday afternoon. Let the show begin! Most people are not fond of summers in Florida due to the heat and humidity, but what comes with it are the backdrops of Hollywood movies. The sets created in the sky are surreal and legendary. It started around 3 pm. The cumulonimbus cloud reached its peak in the atmosphere. This is the stereotypical Florida thunderhead that you can see 100 miles away. This particular one was about 20 miles east. As the heat rises in the center of the state, cooler air from the Atlantic Ocean moves west to fill the void. As the thunderhead grows it starts to move east. Around 4 pm, a dark line started to appear as it rolled toward my location near the coast. This dark gray, almost black, line is the lower edge of the storm. It is dark, billowy and menacing. It looks like an enormous alien spaceship approaching slowly, like something from a Steven Speilberg movie. Once it is about a 3 miles away you feel a sudden cool wind hit you. This is the 10 minute warning that the thundercloud is about to get mean and nasty, and unload all of its liquid contents. As I saw the front line approaching, I drove down to the river to get a wider perspective of the entire front. As the front approached, it started to unveil its electrical charges. Inside the cumulonimbus cloud there is an updraft of positively charged super cooled cloud droplets, and falling negatively charged hail. As the negative charges in the cloud increases, the ground responds by becoming more positively charged. When the positive and negative charges grow large enough, lightning occurs between the two charges within the cloud, and between the cloud and the ground. Once the cool air hit my face the show began. The front line started rearing up, roiling, billowing, and fluctuating like it was a live beast. Then, the first lightning strike hit. Then, multiple strikes for the next ten minutes. Behind the strikes the rain started falling like giant individual curtain sheets at several different locations beyond the front line. It appeared that a giant battle in the sky was ready to begin in a Game of Thrones episode. In battles over the course of history, there have been many signals given to commence the offensive. One of them, as they always say in battle in the movies, was "charge!" A charge is "an offensive maneuver in battle in which combatants advance towards their enemy... as a dominant shock attack". These charges have lead to many decisive moments in the history of warfare. For example, The Battle of Somme took place during World War I and was fought between the armies of the British Empire and the German Empire. It lasted for 4 months in 1916 near the Somme River in northern France. More than 3 million men fought in the battle, and 1 million were wounded or killed, making it one of the worst battles in history! The battle began on July 1st, 2016 where 21,000 soldiers died on the first day of battle! Obviously with any charge, there is the cold reality that those who go first will not likely survive. Just 5 days later, on July 6th, my great uncle George Gregory Hudson was sent to the front line to replace the dwindling troops. He too perished from the gunfire. Some 35 years later, history would nearly repeat itself when my uncle George Gregory Hudson(who was named after my great uncle) was badly wounded by an explosion in the Korean War. Fortunately, he would survive. There is a positive and a negative that comes out of every battle and every war. Fortunately, for America, we won the war and it helped to restore the peace and order for Europe. Unfortunately, for my great grandmother, she lost her second son, and it was a tipping point for her, as she decided then and there to gather her children and immigrate to Michigan through Ellis island in New York City for a better life. The greater positive that comes after war is peace. Let's hope that history does not repeat itself with war charges. Like the storm yesterday, there is a charge that builds up, chaos ensues, then there is calm after the storm. The sky was blue, clear and fresh this morning. After the storm there is peace. Tomorrow is another day in the Florida summer. It's only a matter of time before charges build up again and cause a new strike. Thanks to those who served in the wars that restored peace, we can better appreciate the peace and calm after the storm. We can also appreciate the charges that build up each day and the magnificent storms they create. It is quite a spectacle to see thunderstorm charges. Just sit back, relax and enjoy a sky show. I can get pretty charged up about that!