The 1863 Lightning Strike on a Copper Still at Fort Wilkins, New Hampshire

My black bear, Barnaby, grows touchy whenever the sky darkens over Catamount Hill. On a clear night he will lie quiet on his chain, but let the air turn close and he grunts and drags that chain until I threaten to sell him to a Concord furrier for a lady's muff and two carriage robes. He has reason for it. Every hair on that animal remembers a certain July night, and I set the story down here for my brother alchemists. It concerns lightning, copper, fire, one bear, and one revenue deputy who came away with a very bad backside.

What a Bolt Is, and What a Peddler Sold Me

First you must know what lightning is, and what fools we Yankees made of ourselves trying to fend it off. In the early 1750s old Ben Franklin, the Philadelphia printer, worked out that a sharpened iron rod on the roof, run down the side of the house and into deep wet earth, would carry the bolt to ground before it got into the rafters. The idea is sound, but only when the rod runs unbroken into moist earth. A rod that ends in dry ground is worse than no rod at all. It invites the lightning in to supper and then has no way to show it out, so the bolt jumps sideways into the nearest metal it fancies. The learned men call that a side-flash. The bolt itself is a channel of fire through the air, hotter than the face of the sun several times over. The air heats so fast that it bursts outward, and that burst is the thunder you hear. I have bribed sheriffs, magistrates and once a Methodist choir, but I have never bribed a thunderhead.

In the summer of 1863 the war was on, and Mr. Lincoln's revenue men were sniffing at every chimney from Concord to the Notch. Lightning-rod peddlers were thick on the roads, their wagons hung with glass balls and twisted rods. Mine was a Lowell man named Ezra Tibbetts, who had a handshake like a wet trout and a conscience to match. He looked over my still-house and called it a lightning bottle waiting for a cork. On that point he was right. Copper conducts about as well as any common metal, and that is why the lightning goes looking for it. I paid him four dollars and a jar of rye. He ran a rod up the big white pine beside my still-house window and down the trunk. Then, instead of driving the end six feet into wet clay, he tucked it into my ash heap and drove off whistling. My copper worm sat in its water barrel three feet from that trunk.

The Night the Sky Came Down

It was the dog days, so close and sticky that the flies walked instead of flying. I had a run of rye going with the fire low and the worm cooling by the window, and I was catching the run in small numbered jars. Out past the woodpile a twig snapped and somebody cursed. A Merrimack revenue deputy named Hollis Twombly was squatting in my sumac with a dark lantern. He had no warrant, no partner and no sense, and he meant to catch me pouring and make his name.

A thunderhead came over Catamount as black as a tooth gone bad at the root. The air smelled like a fresh-struck match, and Barnaby moaned like a church organ with the bellows torn. Then the whole world went white. The bolt split the white pine down the middle and ran down the peddler's rod into the ash heap. The ash heap would not take it, so it jumped through my window in a sheet of blue and went straight into the copper coil. I watched the worm glow as red as a horseshoe in the forge. The water in the barrel turned to steam in a breath, the hoops let go, and the staves flew out like a hand of cards thrown at a cheat. The coil sagged and melted itself into a knot. To this day it carries a lump the size of a hen's egg.

A full jar of heads sat on the bench. The hot copper lit the vapour and the jar went up. Mark this well: burning alcohol gives a pale blue flame that you can hardly see by lamplight. I took it for a shimmer of heat until my sleeve caught. I did not throw a bucket or dance about. I pulled the fire door, banked the firebox, threw a wet horse blanket over the bench and poured sand from the fire bucket. You must smother it and starve it of heat. Nothing else will serve.

A Bear, a Deputy, and Dental Silk

Barnaby was chained by an iron staple to that same pine. Some of the current came down his chain, and every hair on four hundred pounds of bear stood straight up until he looked like a haystack that had been told bad news. He was smoking at the shoulders and stank like a singed hog at a Thanksgiving scald. He gave a bellow I felt in my fillings, tore the staple out of the split trunk, and went looking for somebody to blame.

The current had also run along the wet ground and knocked Twombly flat. His boots were blown clean off and landed ten yards apart. Up his back ran a red branching mark like a frost fern on a winter window, the same figure the German professor Lichtenberg drew in his electrical experiments eighty years ago. Barnaby sat on him, and four hundred pounds of furious bear on a man's kidneys sounds like a feather tick full of wet oats. Then the bear raked him once across the seat. The deputy's britches came away with a slab of his left haunch in them about the size of a pork chop. Barnaby ate the tallow candle out of the dark lantern and spat out the glass, for he has manners.

I got the bear off with a ham bone and a good deal of language. Then I laid the deputy face down on the bench I had just put out, washed the wound with clean hearts spirit, and sewed him up with dental silk. He never filed a report. The county manual has no paragraph for a man struck by God, sat on by a bear, and sewn up by the suspect.

Lightning Lore from the Blue Ridge

Clara Higgins, an herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came north to trade tales with me. She is the one visitor who has never been afraid of me, which I find insulting. Of my bear she said, "I walked past that bear on the way in and he looked at me like I owed him money." In Floyd County, she told me, the old folks hold that you must never burn lightning-struck wood, or the lightning will follow the smoke home. Her great-uncle Jubal burned a split persimmon under his still all one fall just to spite the holler. Nothing fell on him from the sky, but his wife put him out in the corn crib for a year. She also told of a still-hand on Bull Mountain who sheltered from a storm under a big copper boiler. The bolt struck the hill above him, and he crawled out with his whiskers standing straight out like a scrub brush and singed at the ends. I will speak plainly about him: he was a lucky fool. No roof in a still-house is safe in a thunderstorm, and neither is the ground under a pot or a lone tree. When the sky goes black, bank your fire, shut the still down, and go into a proper house well away from the metal.

Mountain folk call raw new whiskey 'chain lightning' because one swallow goes down link by link, like a log chain dragged across every rib. Clara's granny swore that thunder soured cider and kept horseshoe nails in the barrel against it. The nails never once worked. What finally worked was a tight bung and a cool springhouse, because the souring comes from the warm, close weather that runs ahead of the storm, which feeds the souring creatures in the air. The French chemist Pasteur published a fine study of vinegar-making just last year. Clara also warned against applejack made by freezing hard cider and pulling off the ice, which they call jacking. Freezing takes out only the water. Every bit of the bad stuff stays behind and grows stronger. One barrel jacked in Botetourt County gave half the county a three-day headache, which the old folks called the apple palsy.

Lessons at the Apparatus

First the law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful, and what follows is for history and education. For a five-gallon wash, cook about eight pounds of cracked corn near the boil until it is as thick as porridge. Cool it to about one hundred fifty degrees and stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley. The malt's enzymes cut starch into sugar best between roughly one hundred forty-eight and one hundred fifty-five degrees. Hold it there an hour wrapped in a horse blanket. To test it, put a spoonful on a white saucer with one drop of tincture of iodine. If it turns blue-black, starch remains. If it stays brown, the malt has done its work. Cool the mash to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work about a week.

Run with a low fire and keep every joint tight. Keep sand and a wet blanket within arm's reach, and never leave a running still alone. Methanol boils near one hundred forty-eight degrees, ethanol near one hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. Even so, the poison does not leave first and shut the door behind it. It smears through the early run like jam on a child. Throw out the foreshots generously, near a cup for every five gallons of wash and more for fruit. Set aside the heads, which smell of solvent, and never drink them or use them as a rinse. Keep the sweet hearts, and save the oily tails for the next run. Catch the whole run in small numbered jars and make your cuts jar by jar, because one big crock hides your mistakes. Remember also that copper draws the sulfur stink from the vapour but pays for it with its own body, growing thinner at the neck and coil with every run. It is like a country dentist, who takes the rot out of others and wears himself down doing it.

Ash Buckets, Blue Flames, and a Second Bolt

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent me his uncle's question: "throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that?" Hickory ash is potash, which is lye. It may take some of the sourness out of an acid wash, but too much makes the spirit soapy, and it does nothing whatever about methanol. Red oak gives colour and tannin but no purity, and coopers use only white oak for barrels because red oak's open pores let the liquor weep out through the staves. Methanol comes mostly from pectin, so fruit mashes call for a bigger foreshot cut, not a bigger ash bucket. As for the spoonful set alight, methanol burns blue too. The colour of the flame mostly shows the spirit's strength, not its cleanness.

Last, the saying that lightning never strikes twice is false. My white pine took a second bolt in '64. By then I had buried a proper copper ground six feet down in wet clay, so the bolt went where it belonged and Barnaby only hid under the porch. I stamped Rabbit a large cent with a little lightning bolt on the back, cut from the scar on my coil. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.