I couldn’t have described this when I wrote that piece for whoever it was. In any case, I didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t know what had happened but I do now. Four hundred thousand volts leaping from an overhead line to someone standing on the pylon can cause an explosion. A small explosion, perhaps, but loud enough and bright enough to terrify. It seems as if the climber the line has struck has been engulfed in a ball of fire. To be a bit technical, just for this once, it’s not the voltage that flows through you but the current. The automatic protection equipment at the substation at each end of the line detects the change in flow and trips out the circuit. Although it does this within a fraction of a second, 20,000 amps can still flow through the human body.

Daniel’s body. The flash was blinding and the noise like a bomb going off. I don’t think he cried out. The force of the electricity flung him off the pylon but instead of falling, he was caught in the struts. He hung in a diamond-shaped frame of steel, one knee hooked over a strut, the other dangling. I made a grab for him. I held him by the belt of his jeans and he hung there, half-seated in the latticework, his back to me, his head hanging, his arms limp and swaying.

I began to shout and scream for help, I shouted at the top of my lungs. I screamed, “Help me, help me!” I don’t know how long I was screaming before Guy came running up the field. It was Guy, but I hardly knew him then. He saw us, called out, “Hold on! I’ll get help,” and ran to his car up on the road. Not many people had phones in their cars then but he did. I talked to Daniel, I said he’d be all right, I said help was coming, an ambulance would come and we’d get him down. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Even then I said that. I so desperately wanted him to speak. I didn’t know then that he was past speech, that he would never speak again.

It was just as well for me that I didn’t find out for a while what happens when that number of amps flows through someone. He effectively cooks from the inside out with deep and widespread burns, often to the bone. Nasty, isn’t it? Not something one wants to dwell on. An insensitive doctor, visiting me in the hospital, hating me and blaming me, I suppose, compared it to what happens to meat in a microwave.