The storm had come in quickly. My 10-year-old son and I could already hear thunder as we paddled our kayaks furiously to shore. Once there, we had just enough time to scramble up the bank and under tree cover to our campsite before the heavens opened up.

Within minutes, puddles of water were everywhere, and no firewood in the forest was remotely dry. The downpour was deafening. We already had a tarp set up over our fire pit, so my son and husband tried to get a fire going while I went to check on the other kids.

I found my 6-year-old trembling beneath his magazine in his hammock. I bent to lightly touch his shoulder as I assured him that we were safe from lightning under tree cover: we were not the tallest thing around, not near anything metal, and not out on the open water of the Vermont reservoir where my husband and I and our five children were camping.

That's when the bolt hit me.

Not directly, or I probably wouldn't be here to tell you about it.

The lightning must have traveled from the water-logged ground through my feet. What I remember most is the explosive pain in my right forearm, as though millions of darts were trying to shoot out of my skin. I heard my own screams, understood that I was being electrocuted, and thought I was probably going to die.

Then it was over, and I wasn't dead, although I couldn't move my right arm below my elbow. I found that I was several feet from my son's hammock; I must have leapt or been thrown away when the bolt struck me. Through the deafening sounds of the pouring rain, I heard my husband shout, "Are you OK?"

"I got hit by lightning!" I screamed.

"We all did!" he yelled back.

My eyes went immediately to the tent where my baby had been napping—the tent that was now in the middle of a small-room-sized, inches-deep puddle. I have no words to describe what I felt as I looked at that tent and heard only the sounds of the rain and the thunder, but no crying, and as my eyes moved to the hammock where my 2-year-old daughter had been napping on the other side of the same puddle.

Yet, when my husband got the baby out of the tent, he was fine. Miraculously, he hadn't been hit. My daughter hadn't either, and my 8-year-old, who had been reading in another hammock just up a small bank, had received only a small zap on his rear end, which was brushing the ground because his nylon hammock had sagged a bit.

My ten-year-old had been standing on the ring of rocks around the campfire pit. A puddle surrounded the rocks; his dad, who was standing close by but on the ground rather than the rocks, did get hit, but my son didn't feel a thing.

My 6-year-old got a strong zap to the shoulder where I'd been touching him. But he, too, was OK.

We didn't have time to contemplate our good fortune for more than a few seconds. The booming thunder and the lightning flashes kept coming, and we had to figure out the safest place to be. We briefly considered a wooden backwoods privy (basically a toilet on a platform over a hole in the ground) because at least it was off the ground, but we soon realized that those of us in the hammocks had been safe. As an added bonus, we had rain flies over them, a comfort the privy didn't have. We didn't have hammocks set up for everyone, but some of us doubled up, and everyone got off the ground to ride out the storm.

It was a long ride. The rain didn't let up until morning, and the thunder and lightning kept rolling through. I have never prayed so hard in my life.

We packed up camp the next day and paddled back to our car as a light drizzle started up. We drove home in another thunderstorm. It wasn't until the trip was over that we were able to truly appreciate how lucky we had been. Needless to say, we've since researched and learned a lot about lightning.

How does lightning happen?

Lightning forms when the top of a cloud acquires a positive charge while the bottom acquires a negative charge. This creates an electric field and the potential for a lightning strike. Scientists still aren't entirely sure why clouds become charged in the first place, although they have some plausible ideas.

You've probably noticed that the negative ends of magnets push each other away. The same sort of thing happens between the negatively charged bottoms of the clouds and the negatively charged electrons at the Earth's surface. These electrons move toward the Earth's core, away from the clouds. This leaves a positive charge on the Earth's surface and creates an electric field between the negatively charged clouds and the positively charged Earth. When the electric field becomes strong enough—we're talking tens of thousands of volts per inch—the air becomes ionized, which means the electrons in the air can move more freely and are able to conduct electricity.

There is now a path for lightning to move from the cloud to the Earth. When it does, bolt temperatures can be hotter than the surface of the sun.

It's electrifying

Tens of thousands of volts per inch is a lot of electricity. There are approximately 2,000 thunderstorms and 100 lightning strikes to Earth per second—if we were somehow able to harness all that energy, the benefits could be huge!

Lightning can contain 100 million to 1 billion volts, which means it could provide billions of watts of power. The average lightning strike could power a 100 watt light bulb continuously for more than 3 months. If that doesn't seem impressive enough, consider that a 100 watt bulb uses 100 watts of power per second.

Harnessing lightning's energy for practical use faces several substantial obstacles, not the least of which is attracting the bolt in the first place and capturing and then converting such a huge but quickly dispersed flash of energy. Yet MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering James Kirtley is hopeful that engineers will someday figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense.

Lightning is unpredictable

You don't need to be in the middle of a storm to get hit by lightning; bolts can leap over from nearby storms.

The key point to remember is this: if you can hear thunder, you're not safe.

You might have heard that you can count the seconds between a lightning flash and the thunder (because light travels faster than sound) and divide by five to estimate the distance from you to the lightning in miles. This technique does work—but it's important to note that lightning can travel up to 10 miles horizontally before striking the ground. Also, just because you know where the last strike was doesn't mean you know much at all about where the next strike will be.

And it's also not true that lightning doesn't strike the same place twice. For example, the tiny village of Kifuka in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is hit by lightning about 158 times each year. And Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo has earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving 250 lightning flashes per square kilometer each year.

The bottom line: lightning is unpredictable. In fact, it doesn't even always strike the tallest thing around. Sometimes it strikes the ground near the tallest thing around.

Don't worry, being hit by lightning is extremely rare

I can't imagine that the chances of surviving such a huge amount of electricity are high, but most people who are struck by lightning are fortunately not hit directly.

Direct lightning strikes account for only 3%–5% of lightning strikes to humans. More than half (50%–55%) of lightning victims experience the effects of a ground strike, and about a third (30%–35%) experience a side flash. During a ground strike (which is probably what my family and I experienced), lightning hits the ground and travels through ground water to the victim, whereas in a side splash, lightning travels partway down an object such as a tall tree and then jumps over to a nearby victim.

Another 3%–5% get hit because they're using a corded phone, touching a faucet, or are near other indoor plumbing or wiring. One bank teller got hit when lightning traveled through an underground speaker, for example.

I'm happy to report that the estimated odds of experiencing any of these forms of lightning vary but are extremely low: about 1 in 960,000 in a year.

Surviving a lightning strike

Despite these low odds, however, some people get hit by—and survive—lightning multiple times.

For example, lightning seems to have had a strange affinity for U.S. Park Ranger Roy Sullivan, who worked in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and was hit seven times between 1942 and 1977.

Melvin Roberts was hit six times, the last of which was on a sunny day while he was cutting his neighbor's grass in Seneca, S.C.

Skies were also blue earlier this year when a referee at a children's football match in Germany took a direct lightning hit. He suffered cardiac arrest and was flown to a nearby hospital. The referee was one of approximately 35 people who were injured by the strike.

From 1984 to 2013, the U.S. averaged 49 reported lightning fatalities per year. Yet miraculously, 90% of lightning victims live to tell the tale, which some share with other survivors at a yearly world conference. Unfortunately, survivors are usually less lucky when it comes to symptoms: 80% of lightning victims sustain serious injuries, such as memory loss, migraines, and personality changes.

Luckily, I don't seem to have any lasting effects myself. I regained movement of all but two fingers within a minute or so, and by the next morning, even my fingers were mostly back to normal. My arm also bears no external signs of my encounter with lightning, but some survivors sustain tragically beautiful lightning-bolt-shaped scars.

How can you avoid getting hit by lightning?

So what can you do—besides making sure you don't live in Kifuka—to avoid being struck by lightning? Well, if you're not in a remote backwoods campsite, get to a building with plumbing and wiring or to a vehicle as soon as you know a storm is approaching. The plumbing and wiring in the building provide a preferable route for electricity to get to the ground, and the metal frame of your vehicle creates a Faraday cage that distributes the electricity around the outside of the vehicle (although the vehicle can still catch on fire, as one Canadian couple discovered firsthand).

Nonetheless, the car-as-Faraday-cage thing really does work, and your car might even still be operable afterward, as Richard Hammond of the BBC's "Top Gear" team proved in a daring intentional lightning hit with the help of the Siemens High-Voltage Laboratory in Berlin.

Despite what you might have heard, the rubber tires on your car (or the rubber soles on your shoes) will not protect you from lightning. The amount of electricity we're dealing with here is just too great.

That isn't to say that you shouldn't put whatever non-conductive materials you can between yourself and the ground if you're caught in a storm far from a grounded shelter or a vehicle. Foam camping pads and air mattresses aren't supposed to keep you safe, but as my own story shows, sometimes they do. My baby was napping on a small air mattress when lightning struck our campsite; small metal objects in our tent scorched holes in the fabric, but that air mattress—which was part of a pop-up toddler tent I nearly decided to leave at home—probably saved my son's life.

And even though my 10-year-old avoided the current from his perch atop the stone campfire ring, rocks aren't supposed to keep you safe, either. Many rocks, including granite and limestone, can conduct electricity under the voltage of a lighting strike. Still, it seems they're better than a big puddle.

Most of us know to avoid standing near tall objects in a storm. If you're in the forest, this means taking shelter near low bushes or in small clearings far away from the tallest trees if you're caught in a thunderstorm.

As we've seen, the most likely way to be hit is through a ground current. If multiple parts of your body are touching the ground when this happens, there will be a voltage difference between the points of contact. The farther apart those points of contact are, the greater the voltage that can flow through your body. You also really don't want electricity to flow through your heart. That's why the leading advice is to stand on the balls of your feet with your heels touching. Never lie flat on the ground when there is danger of lightning.

Lots of sites I visited advised abandoning tents during a storm, but from what I've read it seems that being in a tent isn't actually more dangerous than being outside (and it would obviously be a lot drier) as long as the tent isn't a really old one with metal poles (anodized aluminum or fiberglass poles are good), you're not lying down, and you've pitched your tent in a relatively safe location.

Alternatively, you could purchase a hammock (I like the ENO DoubleNest). Just make sure you don't hang it between two tall trees in an open field.

The bottom line

The truth is that nowhere is truly safe from lightning, especially outside. But refusing to leave the safety of our homes would be crazy—and not too much fun. That's why, when this post goes live, my family and I will be backpacking near a different body of water in Vermont.

Don't worry, though. The forecast is good.