When I was little, I was scared to death of thunderstorms.
That fear was born in Dutch Cove. Whenever a storm rolled in, the creek behind the house would rise until it looked more like whitewater than a little mountain branch. Thunder didn’t just rumble once and move on. It bounced from ridge to ridge, rolling through the hollers until it sounded like the whole mountain was crumbling around you.
And the lightning…
When you live that high up, it doesn’t feel like it’s happening somewhere off in the distance. It feels like it’s all around you.
Papaw never tried to convince me storms weren’t dangerous. That wasn’t his way. He wasn’t about empty reassurances. Instead, he gave me something to do with the fear.
“Count,” he’d say.
The lightning would flash, and I’d start counting.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi…
Then the thunder would come.
Papaw told me every five seconds meant the storm was about a mile away.
I never completely outgrew my fear of storms.
But I learned how to weather them.
And I still catch myself counting.
Just last week, after months without much rain here in the Sandhills, a thunderstorm finally rolled through. I laid in bed listening to the rain on the roof, counting between every flash and every rumble exactly the way Papaw taught me almost forty years ago.
Somewhere between one storm and the next, I counted myself to sleep.
For years, I figured it was just one of those things old-timers believed. The kind of wisdom that sits somewhere between folklore and fact, right alongside red skies at night and woolly worms predicting winter.
Turns out, Papaw was teaching me science.
Lightning and thunder happen at exactly the same moment. The flash is electricity tearing through the sky. The thunder is the sound of the air exploding outward after being heated to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun.
They’re born together.
We just don’t experience them together.
Light travels so fast we see the flash almost instantly. Sound is much slower, traveling about a mile every five seconds. That delay is what you’re counting.
Five seconds? About a mile away.
Ten seconds? Roughly two miles.
Thirty seconds? Around six miles—and close enough that the National Weather Service says you ought to be inside.
Meteorologists even have a name for it: the flash-to-bang method. They also recommend the 30/30 Rule. If thunder follows lightning in less than thirty seconds, it’s time to head indoors, and you should stay there until thirty minutes after the last clap of thunder. Lightning has a habit of striking well beyond the rain itself.
So no, Papaw wasn’t passing down an old wives’ tale.
He was teaching physics without either one of us realizing it.
Of course, people have been trying to explain thunderstorms for thousands of years.
The Greeks believed Zeus threw thunderbolts from Mount Olympus. The Vikings imagined Thor’s hammer crashing through the sky. Many Native American tribes told stories of the Thunderbird, whose wings created thunder while flashes of lightning burst from its eyes or feathers.
Every culture tried to make sense of something powerful enough to stop people in their tracks.
Maybe that’s what we do whenever we’re afraid.
We give fear a name.
We tell stories about it.
Or we count.
Looking back, I think that’s what Papaw really gave me.
Not a weather lesson.
Not a science lesson.
He gave a little girl something steady to hold onto while the mountains shook around her.
Life has a way of sending storms that don’t show up on the weather radar. You can’t stop every one of them. You can’t quiet the thunder. Most of the time, all you can do is keep counting until the worst of it passes.
I’ve taught my girls Papaw’s little trick.
One day, if the good Lord allows it, I’ll teach my grandbabies too. We’ll stand at a window while a summer storm rolls across the North Carolina sky, and I’ll hear myself saying the same words Papaw said to me all those years ago.
“Start counting.”
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
