A couple of years ago I was browsing through stacks of biographies at Powell's Books in Portland and came across a particularly well reviewed biography of the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla, the 'forgotten genius' behind the electric light and many other innovations. The one eccentricity of Tesla's that really drew me in while reading about him, was his penchant for 'bathing' in electro-magnetic fields, allowing the frequency to move through his body. He found this practice invigorating and thought it had multiple beneficial applications, often entertaining his house guests to the spectacle of Tesla alight with electric current while they sat in comfortable chairs enjoying the soft, reverberant glow.
I read many passages in the biography with some discomfort, as I was an inquisitive child myself, and I could relate to some of Tesla's struggles to put his observations into words or to find broad acceptance of his ideas. What I could most relate to, however, was his fascination with electromagnetism. It brought me back to a seminal experience of my early childhood.
We did not initially have central air conditioning in the house we lived in the first ten years of my life. As the family grew, the comfort of electrically cooled air became more of a necessity than a luxury in a modestly sized home with so many occupants. So, at some point my parents bit the financial bullet and had an electrician come and install a window mounted air conditioner in our dining/great room area. I sat on the floor of our living room near the fireplace and front door of the house mesmerized for over two hours as the technician drilled into our window, set the unit inside and caulked it and then bore into the wall, pulling out wires and embedding the air conditioning unit's wires within the large web he then pushed back into the wall and sealed up. I was about five years old at the time, and it was one of the most interesting spectacles I had yet observed. (Note to the reader, it likely would have been even more interesting had the electrician actually grounded the wires he put back into the wall - but more on that later.)
What unfolded in the days and weeks after the install was an influx of cooled air into our house as the early summer temperatures rose outside. All of the Boyd girls were accustomed, from the time we could walk soundly on our own two legs, to spending our days outdoors under the shade of our many fruit trees, our bare legs teased by tall grass as we ran after each other or played with our friends. It wasn't until we had the air conditioner that I understood why it was my parents did not join us outside all day. There was one day in particular about two weeks after we got the air conditioner that all of my sisters and two of our neighbors, the Brashears sisters, decided to put on a play in our backyard. We were rehearsing away for "Cinderella" in the corner of our large backyard nearest to where my father burned yard waste in a large barrel with a mesh barrier atop it. It was a part of the yard that did not get much shade and as I sat on the itchy lawn awaiting assignment of my part in the play (young Lisa Brashears had already been given the starring role), I realized I was very thirsty. Normally I would just go to the hose and turn on the water, but I knew it would run hot before warm, and then likely wouldn't get to cool at all. So I went inside to get a drink of water.
I entered the house through the breezeway and passed through the close air of the laundry room into the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the large kitchen table across the room from me, silhouetted in the window that faced out to our front porch as she perused the morning paper. I told her I needed to get a drink of water and proceeded to scoot the metal two step kitchen stool over to the sink so I could reach the faucet. I pulled one of our brightly colored aluminum cups out of the cabinet and reached over to turn on the faucet. As I did this my mother called out to me to close the kitchen window, as she'd turned on the air conditioning and she didn't want the cool air disappearing outside.
We had those old fashioned crank windows with the heavy metal casings, so I dutifully set my glass down, leaned one hand on the faucet that was pouring out cool water to steady myself and with the other grabbed the metal window crank. The kitchen window was on the same wall as the air conditioner on the other side of the kitchen wall from me. Here's where those ungrounded wires come into play as they had been sending current through the wall blindly, and physics being what it is, that current rolled through the nearest conductor, the heavy metal window frame and its equally heavy metal crank.
My bare feet resting on the metal stool, my right hand on the wet metal faucet and my left hand on the heavily currented window crank, I went from vertical to horizontal immediately. I remember my cheeks feeling as though I was facing into a wind and my teeth chattering and I felt the way static electricity feels when a surge of pure current runs through it. I was a human electromagnetic wave.
My mother leaped up from her perch and ran quickly into the laundry room to grab a broom. She moved in slow motion at my side, screaming something to me that sounded the way warning words sound through voice distorters at slow speed in a good movie soundtrack. In her mind she might have been thinking about the way her older sister, my Aunt Sara, sometimes referred to these freak accidents with Kelly as veiled attempts by my mother to 'thin the herd'. She swung at me frantically with the wooden broom. I wished as the limp blows landed one after the other that she'd worked out more as a child or spent quality time on her softball swing the way I did, but eventually she got in a blow that raised her completely off her feet as the broom made contact with my torso and my scorched hand came clean off the window crank as I flew toward the stove.
I felt the uncomfortable simultaneous need to vomit and vacate my bowels, but believe I did neither as my mother gingerly poked at me with a single finger three or four times and then lifted me by my armpits until I was unsteadily on my feet. My mouth tasted like metal and mesquite barbecue and as I looked down at the palm of my left hand I was startled to see it was scorched, black across the lifeline. My eyes felt like they were bulging within their sockets and the skin of my scalp had an almost indescribable tingling. My mother pulled me to her and hugged me so tightly for a moment that my inability to breathe almost outweighed all of the other interesting new discomforts I was experiencing. She let go finally and stared into my face. She had a ton of children. We fell down, knocked each other down, got stung by bees, ran through closed windows. swung golf clubs into each other's faces - the gamut of childhood catastrophes. Kitchen experimentation with live conductivity was a new one though.
"Are you okay?" She asked me finally, looking dubiously down at me.
"Uh, I guess so." I said, although my voice seemed to be vibrating. It almost sounded cool in its other-worldliness. My heart was also doing its best imitation of a herd of small rabbits pounding against the inside of my chest. And my hair felt funny. Yep, it felt strangely voluminous, yet weightless.
She leaned over me for a long minute, her hands on either of my shoulders, assessing the damage, I suppose.
"Okay then, you can go back outside and play." She released me even as I felt certain I saw terror and concern flash through her gentle brown eyes. 'Really', she must have been thinking, 'they are all going to die of something, someday - but apparently not this, today'.
I moved uncertainly on my rickety legs toward the laundry room and then down the two steps to the breezeway patio. The cement in the slip of shade there felt cool against the soles of my bare feet. I felt like sparks could fly from my fingertips, but not at all invigorated like Tesla. I threw up a little bit in my mouth and rounded the corner onto the back patio, catching sight of the gaggle of young girls at the end of the yard dancing and singing animatedly as they began to run through a scene from Cinderella, the musical. I just kept putting one foot uncertainly in front of the other until I reached them all there in the glare of daylight. Lovely Lisa Brashears, her blond hair long and lustrous, curling at her shoulders, her pale blue eyes widening, put up a stiff arm and a flat palm in my direction. I hadn't seen myself, of course, but now know I was probably a scale model of Madeline Kahn post-copulation with the monster in "Young Frankenstein", hair piled high and frizzy, eyes bugged through reddened sockets, flesh gone white except for the blackened palms of my hands.
"What happened to you?" She asked.
I don't know if I answered her and have no other memory of that day other than that I was eventually cast as one of the mice and told to stick to the background of scenes. A licensed electrician came by our house a day or two later and rewired the air conditioning unit. I drank from the hose for the rest of the summer.
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