Watching the mountain burn

I was beginning this post early this morning, but after many changes, including changes to the title, my laptop gobbled up most of the text. Because of that, the reference to the shipwreck in the last paragraph makes no sense. But it makes sense in the context of the document floating out in cyberspace. I am posting this only to remind me to make all my changes in a Word document.

The sky looked unusual just before dawn this morning. I thought it was because of the spotty, dark clouds moving eastward out of the valley, making a patchwork of brightness and darkness as the sun rose. It turned out not to be the case, however, as the world off to the north became more visible. It then became clear that the strangeness in the scene came from smoke rising from a forest fire that had grown overnight on the mountain directly in my line of sight across Okanagan Lake.

An hour after sunrise, the smoke is rising to about twice the height of the mountain and widening to a plume that merges with the broken cloud deck. Looking toward the sky, it is not possible to tell where that happens.

There’s a terrible beauty about the Bear Creek fire — beauty because the patterns of smoke evoke my aesthetic sensibility, terrible because people’s lives have been disrupted and nobody can tell if some of those lives, in the campground, in the houses, will be changed forever. What makes the scene especially frightening is that the single thin spire of smoke I saw at first has spread out to obscure my view of the mountain altogether.

Now even the thought of a tornado or of a shipwreck could make me swallow my gum, though I avoid that reaction by not chewing gum. But any reaction in the face of nature is inadequate, a humbling reminder of our place in the vast cosmos.