Kalispell, Montana, “Frost damage for fruit, May 15th to July 10th; for grain, June 25th to August 1st.”
Montgomery, Alabama, “During March, April, and May fruit and early vegetables are subject to damage by frost.”
THE THUNDERSTORM EXPOSED
Probably nothing in the world causes more terror than a flash of lightning. In an able-bodied thunderstorm playing about a city there are several dozen flashes, and every one of them brings trepidation, fright, or positive terror to thousands of human beings,—oftenest women, sometimes men, and occasionally children. Yet probably there is no alarm in the world so ill-founded.
Thunderstorms play pretty generally over our three million square miles with their hundred million population. Yet lightning picks out of this crowd only three hundred people a year who are foolish enough to be killed. That is, only three persons in each million to be sacrificed to the most astounding and beautiful display in the world, a mere handful compared to the mounds of motor car victims or to the 33,068 deaths a year attributable to railroads and the perils of track-walking.
The trouble about the thunderstorm is that it does not lull one into the sense of insecure repose. It is too obviously after one. If the thunder were toned down a bit and the lightning a trifle duller the alliance might claim its thousands, like the inconspicuous housefly, and never meet an objection. But until the thunderstorm foregoes its bravado it will continue to bully the ladies into hysterics.
Of course, there is always the sporting chance that you are one of the three in your particular million to perish.
But you can lessen the chance. You must not seek refuge under a tree. You should not take doubtful shelter in a barn. And you had best not sit in a draft by an open window if there is a tree just outside it. By these three avenues most of the thoughtless three hundred (a year) invite their end.
Trees that are tall and otherwise exposed are struck oftenest. The electricity in the cloud and the electricity in the earth are always endeavoring to combine. When this tendency becomes so strong that the resistance of the intervening air is counteracted the electric discharge between thundercloud and earth takes place. This happens most frequently from some pointed thing as a steeple, a tree if they are good conductors. Men and animals are sometimes charged with the electricity opposite to that of the cloud. When the lightning is discharged, even at a distance, the bodies revert rapidly from the electric to the natural state. This return shock or concussion occasionally proves fatal.
That is the reason that trees are such poor protectors from the storm’s fury. Better a wet skin in the middle of a field than precarious dryness under an oak or cherry or tall pine or almost any other tree. If it should hail hard enough to stove in your head take to a beech or a small spruce.