Proud Berkshire Trees

We grew up on a grassy Berkshire knoll flanked on three sides by forest. Our broad lawn sported many old estate trees perhaps 150 years old. The forest had been logged in the 1950s, so few large trees remained among resurgent saplings, which now have grown into trees again.
From the safety of bedroom windows in our house on that knoll we watched many a summer storm sweep across our hilltop and flow down the broad valley beyond, lightening strobing between dark cloud and forested ridges, at times probing deep into the valley, and always followed by reverberating thunder. Over the years, many venerable trees were struck, leaving us with the distinct impression that Berkshire knoll trees are of but two kinds: those that have been struck by lightening, and those still to be struck.
A few years ago while on a walk up one of the many woods roads nearby, we found this shivered hulk of an old hemlock, still almost a hundred feet high. We reconstruct the unseen event from stroboscopic memories at our window.
Pelting rains driven by lashing winds cross the ridge from west to east. Towering, black, rolling clouds carrying an immense electric charge pass over this proud ridge tree, whose reach far above the new growth and whose conductive wet sapwood offer an easy path for that restless power to come home. An almost invisible coronal leader springs from treetop to cloud, provoking a brilliant return flash that blinds us to the immense flow of current between cloud and ground, a power sufficient to instantly boil perhaps 100 pints of sapwood water into some 170,000 pints of violent steam that hurls 50-pound pieces of trunk perhaps a hundred feet as it splashes bark and slivers and lesser bits into and onto the surrounding treetops, brush, and forest floor, the sound of rendering hundreds of pounds of solid wood into bits itself lost in the crash of thunder.
The path of the lightening down the sapwood, the explosive sundering of sapwood from dry heartwood, reveals the energetic fate of many a proud Berkshire tree.