Hunter eager for return to woods despite being hit by lightning

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Dr. Charles Kimball has been heading deep into the Maine woods to Caucomgomoc Lake since 1924. Or maybe it was ’25. He doesn’t remember exactly.

He has spent plenty of time in the northwest corner of Piscataquis County, catching trout, hunting deer and birds, and enjoying time with family and friends.

On Oct. 1, Kimball nearly died there.

The fact that he didn’t – and that he tells the tale with a grin on his face – says something about the 85-year-old former dentist from Carmel.

So, too, do the words he shared with his son, Curt, when Curt visited him in the hospital.

Curt, you see, knew what his father had been through. He’d seen what one random bolt of lightning had done to the clothing his dad had been wearing on the first day of his bird-hunting trip.

And he told his dad how lucky he’d been to survive.

“I’m a tough son of a bitch, aren’t I?” Charles Kimball asked his son.

The answer, of course, is yes.

The first of October began the same way many others have for Kimball. He rose early and had breakfast with his son, Charlie. They talked about plans for that day’s hunt. Then he adjourned to the outhouse before they headed out.

He didn’t come back.

“Way off, four or five miles, I had heard a rumble of thunder,” a talkative Charles Kimball said on Friday, telling his tale from a hospital bed at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

But he never had any idea that a storm was really brewing, or that lightning was an imminent danger.

“I never, ever thought anything about it,” he said. “This was just like a shot of lightning out of a clear, blue sky. I couldn’t believe it. Even now, I can’t. But I know I have to.”

All he knows is that he woke up some time later and found out that he was in trouble.

“It knocked me right over sideways and out cold,” he said. “When I regained consciousness, I started to straighten up and reach out, and I couldn’t feel my hands or my arms. I said, ‘Oh my God. I’ve had a stroke.'”

A few minutes later, Charlie headed outside and found his father. Charles says his son has since told him that the scene was terrifying.

“Things were pretty horrible,” Charles Kimball said. “[Charlie] said he’s read all of [Stephen] King’s novels, but he’s never seen anything as horrible as I was. I was in shreds and tatters and everything else.”

Charlie quickly packed his father into the car and headed for Millinocket, which should have been an hour and a half drive. It didn’t take nearly that long, Charles said.

“Frankly, I didn’t know if I was gonna get to Millinocket or not,” Charles said. “I have never hurt so in my life. It hurt awful.”

The remnants of his clothing paint a vivid picture of the ordeal: The lightning blew a 2-inch-wide hole in his hunting hat, and made an even bigger gash in his shirt. His left pant-leg looks like it lost a battle with a lawnmower, and the exiting voltage caused his left shoe to explode along the stitching. His socks – and virtually everything else he was wearing – are scorched black.

Now, as he recovers during a second stint at EMMC, the burns on his body are beginning to heal. Still, they’re nasty reminders of the ordeal … as is his shattered right eardrum.

Charles Kimball knows he’s lucky. But that fact doesn’t come as a complete surprise to him, either.

Eight years ago, he went to a Florida hospital with chest pains that turned out to be a mild heart attack. Two or three days later, as he recuperated, he had another. And it wasn’t mild at all.

“They had to put the paddles to me three different times to get me back,” he said. “It was so bad, they couldn’t operate. Nobody thought I was ever gonna be back.”

He was, and he credits the therapy he later received at EMMC.

“They made a man out of me,” he said.

Two years later, an aneurysm threatened his life again. Two days after an operation – and just hours after a doctor decided to keep him for another day, just to be safe – he ended up on the operating table again.

“I lost two quarts of blood before they even got me on the table,” he said. “If I’d been anywhere else in the world, that would have been it.

“I’ve been lucky. They say a cat’s got nine lives. I guess I’ve got three or four more left,” he said.

Charles Kimball is old enough to remember the good old days at Caucomgomoc.

“When we first started going up there, if we’d go up for four or five days and we didn’t catch a brook trout that weighed over four or five pounds, we thought something was wrong,” he said. “If you get one now that weighs two pounds, two pounds and a half, you think you have a monster.”

Kimball remembers his first fishing trip, when his father tied three separate flies onto the leader and told him to drift them down a swiftly flowing stream.

That was back in the 1920s. Kimball was 7 or 8. And he’ll never forget hooking onto three fish at once, nor the fact that his dad refused to let him relinquish the rod.

“He coached me and coached me and coached me,” he said. Finally, young Charles Kimball landed all three fish. The trout weighed in at a collective 14 pounds, 2 ounces.

His father also coached him several years later, after taking Charles to a tryout with the Boston Red Sox.

The Sox wanted to assign him to the club’s Single A team in Little Rock, Ark., Charles recalls. On the ride home, his father asked a simple question.

“Do you still want to be a dentist?”

When Charles answered in the affirmative, his father laid down the law.

“He said, ‘You’ve answered my question. You’re not playing ball anymore. That’s it.’ Well, we had a fight and I didn’t speak to him for two or three weeks. But you know what they said: The man that controls the purse strings controls the boy.”

After attending UMaine and Harvard, Charles Kimball became a dentist. He served with the Air Force in World War II, after finding a considerate medical colleague who would overlook the fact that he’d been turned down by the Navy because of an old football injury … and color blindness … and flat feet.

The spunky Kimball quickly found out that military life didn’t suit him too well, either, as he took some grief from a flight surgeon.

“He says, ‘How in the name of God did you ever get in here?'” Charles Kimball recalled. “I said, ‘That’s not the question: How in the name of God do I get out?’ From that time on, I never had any trouble with him.”

Charles Kimball is also young enough to relish the times he spends at Caucomgomoc today … and tomorrow.

That’s right: He’s already planning to head back.

“I told the doctor, ‘You’ve got from now until the first of November, because I’m going deer hunting on the first of November,” Kimball said.

“I can’t travel the way I used to, but still and all, I can be out there, and I can walk a ways, and do this and do that. And I can do some bird hunting, too. That’s easy enough.”

The doctor’s reply? “He said he’d do the best that he could,” Kimball said with a chuckle.

One way or another, Kimball figures he’ll be out there in the woods when deer season opens.

“I’m going up there the first,” he said. “I don’t give a damn. There’s no sense laying back and feeling sorry for yourself.”

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.