The Lightning Strike on the Copper Coil
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the story of the July night in 1863 when a thunderhead rolled off Catamount Hill and put a bolt into his copper worm coil. The strike lit a pale blue fire in the heads jar, made every hair on Barnaby stand up, and sent the bear after a revenue deputy who was hiding in the sumac with no warrant. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings mountain lightning lore, the story behind the slang term 'chain lightning,' and a warning about freeze-jacked applejack. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, on hickory ashes and red oak shavings, then strikes down the blue-flame test and the saying that lightning never strikes twice.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Hush that racket, you overgrown hearth rug. Sky's clear as a widow's conscience tonight. There's not a cloud between here and Catamount Hill. Lie down before I sell you to a Concord furrier for a lady's muff and two carriage robes, with enough left over to upholster a Baptist.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags and drops into the dirt
Wilkins: He's been touchy about the weather ever since a certain July night, and before this hour is out you'll know why. Every hair on that animal remembers it.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the occasional sheriff listening at the keyhole. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Doctor of teeth, beater of iron, stamper of coin, and tonight a survivor of the Almighty's own excise raid. This is the story of the night the sky tried to take my still. Lightning, copper, fire, one bear, and one revenue deputy with a very bad backside. Settle in.
Wilkins: First, a word from the folks who keep my lamp oil paid for.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Real copper, honestly made. That's the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960. Heavy-gauge electrolytic copper, built to last a lifetime. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment one. Before I tell you what the lightning did, you need to know what lightning is, and what fools we Yankees made of ourselves trying to fend it off.
♦ Wax crackle, low distant rumble of thunder from an old effects drum
Wilkins: Back in the early 1750s old Ben Franklin, the printer of Philadelphia, 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 could get into your rafters and your wife's hair. It was a fine idea, and it works, but only if 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 nowhere to show it out, so the bolt jumps sideways into the nearest metal it fancies. The learned men call that a side-flash.
Wilkins: Now picture the summer of 1863. The war's on, Mr. Lincoln's revenue men are sniffing every chimney from Concord to the Notch, and up the turnpike comes a lightning-rod peddler. Back then New England was crawling with those fellows. They had wagons hung with glass balls and twisted rods and a sermon about hellfire ready for every barn they passed. Mine was a Lowell man named Ezra Tibbetts. He had a handshake like a wet trout and a conscience to match, and he was the only man who ever sold me something more dangerous than what I already owned.
Wilkins: Tibbetts looked at my still-house and said, Doctor, a building with that much copper in it is a lightning bottle waiting for a cork. He was right about that, I'll give him that much. Copper is about as good a conductor as you'll find among the common metals. That's why we make rods of it, and it's also why the lightning goes looking for it. So I paid him four dollars and a jar of rye, and he ran a rod up the big white pine by my still-house window and down the trunk. Then, instead of digging it six feet into the wet clay like an honest man, he tucked the end into my ash heap and drove off whistling. Ezra Tibbetts grounded my rod in an ash heap, which is about how well he grounded his marriage.
Wilkins: You should also understand what a bolt actually is. It's a channel of fire through the air, hotter than the face of the sun several times over. The air heats so fast it bursts outward, and that burst is your thunder. That's the cannon you hear rolling off Catamount Hill on a muggy night. When it comes for you there is no running, no praying, and no paying it off. I have bribed sheriffs, magistrates, and once a Methodist choir. I have never bribed a thunderhead.
Wilkins: One more word of history. The old farmers of the Suncook Valley swore you should never stand under a lone tree in a storm, and they were right. The tall lone tree is the bolt's favorite church. And you're no safer in a shed than you are under the tree. I'll come back to that. For now, just remember there was a tall white pine beside my still-house, a crooked peddler's rod nailed to it, and a copper worm coil sitting in its water barrel three feet from the trunk.
♪ Banjo transition, a little ominous in a minor key
Wilkins: Segment two. Legends, outlaws, and lightning. I've got a guest down from the Blue Ridge of Virginia tonight. She knows more mountain slang than a riverboat gambler knows card tricks, and she's never once been afraid of me, which I find insulting. Clara Higgins, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Clara: Why, thank you, Doctor. I walked past that bear on the way in and he looked at me like I owed him money.
Wilkins: Everybody owes Barnaby money. He keeps the ledger in his head and collects in meat. Now, Clara, I mean to tell the story of the strike first, and then I want your mountain lightning tales, because I know you've got some stored up like jars in a root cellar.
Clara: Tell it, Doctor. I've heard it secondhand in three counties and every version had the bear a foot taller.
Wilkins: The bear was every inch of it. July of 1863, the dog days. It was so close and sticky that the flies walked instead of flying. I had a run of rye going in the still-house, fire low and the worm coil cooling in its barrel by the window, and I was catching the run in my little numbered jars. Out past the woodpile I heard a twig snap, and then a curse. A Merrimack revenue deputy named Hollis Twombly was squatting in my sumac with a dark lantern. No warrant, no partner, and no sense. He meant to catch me pouring and make his name.
Clara: Hiding in sumac in July? That man was itching for trouble in the plainest way.
Wilkins: He was, and the trouble was on its way. Over Catamount came a thunderhead black as a tooth gone bad at the root. The wind turned and the air smelled like a fresh-struck match. Barnaby was out on his chain moaning like a church organ with the bellows torn. Then the whole world turned white.
♦ Enormous crack of thunder, glass rattling, wax crackle spikes
Wilkins: The bolt hit that white pine dead center and opened it like a split log. Down the peddler's rod it went, into the ash heap, and the ash heap wanted nothing to do with it. So it jumped. It came through my window in a sheet of blue and went straight into the copper coil. I watched that worm glow red as a horseshoe in the forge. The water in the cooling barrel flashed 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 at the bend. My worm coil has a lump in it the size of a hen's egg, and it's the only thing in Fort Wilkins that's been touched by heaven.
Clara: Lord have mercy. And the still was running?
Wilkins: Running, and a full jar of heads sitting on the bench. The hot copper lit the vapor and the heads jar went up. Here's what I want every listener to remember: burning alcohol makes a pale blue flame you can hardly see by lamplight. I thought the bench was just shimmering with heat until my sleeve caught. I did not throw a bucket and 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. Smother it, and starve it of heat. That's the only way.
Clara: And Barnaby?
Wilkins: Barnaby was chained by an iron staple to that same white 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 twice his size and smoking at the shoulders, and he stank like a singed hog at a Thanksgiving scald. He gave a bellow I felt in my fillings, yanked the staple clean out of the split trunk, and went looking for somebody to blame.
Clara: And there sat the deputy in the sumac.
Wilkins: There sat Hollis Twombly, and he'd been struck too. The bolt had run along the wet ground and knocked him flat. His boots were blown clean off his feet and landed ten yards apart, and they made more progress toward the county line than he did. Up his back, from the belt to the collar, was a red branching mark like a frost fern on a winter window. A German professor named Lichtenberg drew those same branching figures in his electrical experiments eighty years ago, and here was one painted on a Merrimack deputy's hide. Barnaby sat on him. Four hundred pounds of furious, smoking bear dropped onto a man's kidneys makes a sound like a feather tick full of wet oats being sat on by a preacher. Then that bear raked him once across the seat. It ripped like wet canvas tearing down a sail seam, and his 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, glass and all, then spat out the glass. He's got manners.
Clara: Doctor, I'm going to have that pork chop in my dreams tonight.
Wilkins: You and Twombly both. I got the bear off with a ham bone and a good deal of language. Then I hauled the deputy into the still-house, laid him face down on the bench I'd just put out, washed the wound with clean hearts spirit, and sewed his backside up with dental silk. It was the first time in his career a Merrimack deputy got stitched up by somebody other than a magistrate. He never filed a report. There's no paragraph in the county manual for struck by God, sat on by a bear, and sewn up by the suspect.
Clara: Well, that beats everything. All right, let me trade you some Blue Ridge lightning. Up in Floyd County, Virginia, my great-uncle Jubal had a still under a big old persimmon tree. A storm split that tree right down the middle, and the old folks there believe you must never burn lightning-struck wood, or the lightning will follow the smoke home and find your house.
Wilkins: There's sense in it if you're a coward and poetry in it if you're a Baptist.
Clara: Jubal was neither one. He was stubborn as a fence post in frost. He chopped that split persimmon into stove lengths and fired his still with it all fall, just to spite the whole holler. Nothing came down on him from the sky. What came down on him was his wife. She said if he wanted to court lightning he could do it from the corn crib, and she put him out there a full year. Said he snored better among the rats anyhow.
Wilkins: A man who shelters under copper in a lightning storm is like a man who hides from his wife in her sewing basket. Jubal at least picked the right enemy.
Clara: Speaking of sheltering under copper, there was a still-hand over on Bull Mountain who did exactly that. The storm came on, and he thought the big copper boiler was a fine roof, so he crawled underneath. The bolt hit the hill above. He didn't get struck square, praise be, but he came crawling out with every whisker on his chin straight out like a scrub brush and the ends singed off. He swore off copper shelter for the rest of his life. He'd stand in the open field and get rained on before he'd go near that pot in a storm.
Wilkins: And this is me speaking plain, as a dentist and not a showman: he was a lucky fool. There's no safe roof in a still-house in a thunderstorm, and no safe spot under a pot or a lone tree. When the sky goes black, you bank your fire, shut the still down, and go into a proper house, well away from the metal.
Clara: Amen. Now, you asked me for slang. You know where 'chain lightning' comes from, Doctor?
Wilkins: I've drunk my share of it and never once asked its pedigree.
Clara: My granny said raw new whiskey got that name because one swallow goes down you link by link, like a log chain dragged across every rib. And down in Patrick County a man named his mule Chain Lightning after it kicked him clean through a rail fence. He said the mule and the whiskey hit with the same authority, only the mule didn't charge for it.
Wilkins: I knew a mule like that in Barnstead. Kicked a tax assessor so hard his ledger came out in the next town balanced.
Clara: And here's one for your bawdy listeners, Doctor. Up home the chamber pot is the thunder-mug, and I suspect you can work out why on your own.
Wilkins: Clara, you could sell a thunder-mug to a man who already owns two and make him thank you for the handle.
Clara: I have, and he did! My grandmother also swore that thunder would sour the milk and turn hard cider to vinegar. She kept a fistful of horseshoe nails in the cider barrel to ward it off. It never once worked until she started keeping the bung shut tight and rolled the barrel down to the cold springhouse.
Wilkins: Your granny was a natural philosopher and never knew it. It isn't the thunder that sours your cider. It's the warm, close weather that comes ahead of the storm, which feeds the souring creatures in the air. A French chemist named Pasteur published a fine study of vinegar-making just last year. Cool your barrel and keep it shut, and the thunder can holler all it likes.
Clara: One more, and then I'll let you sell your copper. You know they make applejack by freezing hard cider in the dooryard and pulling the ice off. They call it jacking.
Wilkins: Lazy man's distilling.
Clara: Lazy and hurtful. There was a fellow in Botetourt County who jacked a whole barrel and served it at a corn-shucking. Freezing only takes the water out. Every bit of the bad stuff stays behind and gets stronger, because nobody ever cut the heads. Half the county got a headache that lasted three days and hit so hard men walked into barn doors. The old folks called it the apple palsy.
Wilkins: That's the truest thing said on this program all year. Freezing concentrates the poison right along with the cheer. Clara Higgins, stay put, because I want you for the myths. But first my sponsor wants a word.
♪ Brisk parlor piano and banjo vamp, medicine-show style
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♪ Vamp ends with a cymbal tap
♦ Wax crackle, slow drip into jar
Wilkins: Segment three. Copper and the craft. I've told you how the sky tried to steal my still, so now let me tell you how a man earns it back. This is the alchemy, step by step. And mind this first: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only.
Wilkins: Step one is the mash. For a five-gallon wash, take about eight pounds of cracked corn and cook it near the boil in five gallons of water until it's thick as porridge. Let it cool to about one hundred fifty degrees by the thermometer, then stir in two pounds of crushed malted barley. The malt carries enzymes, little workers that cut starch into sugar, and they work best between roughly one hundred forty-eight and one hundred fifty-five degrees. Hold it there an hour, wrapped in a horse blanket.
Wilkins: Here's a trick from the apothecary shop. Put a spoonful of mash on a white saucer and add one drop of tincture of iodine. If it turns blue-black, there's still starch, so keep waiting. If it stays brown, your malt has done its work. Chemists have known that test for fifty years, and most moonshiners have never heard of it, which is why their whiskey tastes like a wet sock.
Wilkins: Step two, cool it to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and let it work in a well-aired room for about a week until it goes quiet and sour-sweet. That's your wash, a few percent strong, and the still will concentrate it.
Wilkins: Step three is the run, and this is where the lightning lesson comes in. Fire low. Never leave a running still alone, not to fetch the cow, not to chase a deputy, and not to watch a thunderhead. Keep every joint tight so no vapor leaks toward the firebox. Keep sand and a wet blanket within arm's reach. And if the sky goes black, shut her down, bank the fire, and walk away. I lost a coil, a barrel, and an eyebrow, and I'm the lucky one.
Wilkins: Step four, the cuts. Methanol boils near one hundred forty-eight degrees, ethanol near one hundred seventy-three, and water at two hundred twelve. Fools hear that and think the poison politely leaves first and shuts the door behind it. It doesn't. It smears through the early part of the run like jam on a child. So throw out your foreshots generously, near a cup for every five gallons of wash, and more if it's a fruit mash. Then catch the heads, which smell of nail varnish and solvent, and set them aside. Never drink them. Never use them as a rinse.
Wilkins: The hearts come next, sweet and clean. Then come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, and you set those by for the next run. And catch the whole run in many small numbered jars, not one big crock. Line them up on the bench, smell each one, dab a drop on your wrist, and make your cuts jar by jar. One big crock hides your mistakes. Twenty small jars show you exactly where they are.
Wilkins: Last, the copper itself. Copper draws the sulfur stink, the rotten egg and boiled cabbage, out of your vapor. But here's what nobody tells you: it pays for that work with its own body. Every run eats a little of it. Over the years a working still gets thinner at the neck and the coil, until one day you need new copper whether lightning hits it or not. A copper still is like a country dentist. It takes the rot out of others and wears itself down doing it.
♪ Fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment four. Myths, slang, and the call-in tape. Clara, sit close to the horn. Barnaby, quiet. We've got a voice all the way from North Carolina.
♦ Wax cylinder changeover, hiss, needle drop
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for writing in and putting it on the tape. Your uncle is half a chemist and half a horse trader, so let's give each half its due.
Wilkins: First, hickory ash. What is ash? It's potash. It's lye, the same stuff your grandmother boiled with tallow to make soap. Lye will knock down some of the sourness in a wash that's turned acid, so if your uncle's mash was going vinegary, a pinch of ash may have made the run taste less sour. That's the grain of truth. But put in too much and you're distilling the washtub, soapy and bitter. And lye does nothing whatever about the methanol.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, anvil ring
Wilkins: Second, red oak shavings. Oak gives tannin and color, so the spirit looks older, but it's no purer. And mark this. Every cooper in New England builds whiskey barrels from white oak, never red, because white oak's pores are plugged by natural growths in the wood, and red oak's pores are open tubes. Fill a red oak barrel and your liquor weeps out through the staves onto the floor. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings add color to the spirit the way a fresh coat of paint adds honesty to a horse trader.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, anvil ring
Clara: And tell him about the fruit, Doctor. That's where it really matters.
Wilkins: Clara's right. The methanol mostly comes from pectin, the stuff that sets jelly. So apple, peach, and persimmon mashes make more of it than corn does. If your uncle runs fruit, he needs a bigger foreshot cut, not a bigger ash bucket. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them away and throw them out.
Wilkins: Now let's strike down an old myth. They'll tell you to pour a spoonful of shine and set a match to it. If it burns blue, they say it's pure, and if it burns yellow, it's poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, anvil ring
Wilkins: Hogwash. Methanol burns with a pale blue flame too. The flame color mostly tells you how strong the spirit is, not how clean it is. A man can watch a beautiful blue flame on a spoonful of pure methanol and go blind for his trouble. If the blue flame proved purity, every Concord drunkard with a lamp would be a chemist and every chemist would be a drunkard, and only one half of that is true.
Clara: And while you've got that hammer up, strike down lightning never strikes twice.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, anvil ring
Wilkins: Gladly. Lightning likes the tall and the well-grounded, and it'll come back to the same steeple, the same pine, and the same fool year after year. That white pine of mine took a second bolt in '64, and by then I'd 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. Lightning never strikes the same place twice, they say. I've been married, arrested, and bitten by a blacksmith's mule, and life strikes the same place as often as it pleases.
Wilkins: Rabbit, here's a shout from the Suncook Valley to Wilkesboro. Thank your uncle for the question, and tell him the ash bucket goes back by the soap kettle where it belongs. I've just stamped a large cent in your honor. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and on the back a little lightning bolt cut from the scar on my coil.
♦ Final steel punch clang on copper coin, coin rings and spins on the anvil
Wilkins: Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, thank you for coming north, for the thunder-mug, and for the apple palsy, which I'll be warning folks about until I'm dead.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. And give Barnaby my regards, from a good safe distance.
Wilkins: Everybody's regards reach Barnaby from a distance. It's the only way they arrive whole. He's gone off thunderstorms the way a deacon goes off cards: loudly, publicly, and only after a bad night.
Announcer: A quick word before goodnight! The Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is pure electrolytic copper built to outlast the storm. See it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order now at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: Before I go, if you want to learn this craft the honest way, from mash to cuts, the copper and the fire, the history and the law, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run jar by jar, to keep your copper bright, to respect the fire, and to know foreshots from hearts the way I know a molar from a canine. No lightning required. It's for historical and educational purposes, and if you want to make spirits for drinking, get your federal permit first and do it inside the law.
Wilkins: The storm's gone off over Northwood now, the jar's nearly full, and the bear's asleep. That's as close to heaven as Merrimack County gets.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence