Now What?

Yesterday we went to Lowe's to get the last bits to finish the bamboo screening project--a project that turned out perfect, other than working in blistering heat and Nick having to dig a trench big enough to stuff a Great Baboon into.  It was a grueling 6 days, but wow, one major chore almost completed...woo hoo.

So, it's very hot at Lowe's, heading towards 90*+, with clear, endless boring blue skies.  When we got home, the humidity was soul-sucking and we decided to pause, have lunch and cool off before tackling the stone work around the bamboo.

Lunch over, tea made, we're having a rare relaxing hour when Nick says, "Is it getting dark or is my eyesight going?"  Suddenly I realize that yes, the usual glaring bright light of the sun has dimmed considerably.  Nick thinks maybe we're getting an unexpected thunderstorm so we go out on the front porch to check it out...and honestly, I couldn't believe my eyes...

An enormous fiery cloud was rolling towards us; billows of smoke and ash, and all weirdly in total silence: no wind noise, no birds, no dogs barking, no noise at all...except then in the distance we could hear the whump whump of helicopters as they began to haul water from the river in big balloon buckets towards the east.

I had one of those awful stomach-clenching moments as fear rolled through me and I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.  An hour before it had been absolutely clear blue skies and now, in just a few short minutes, I was looking into the face of Armageddon.

I turned to look up the road and saw most of my neighbors staring up at the sky as well, all of us watching this unbelievable fire cloud rolling towards us.  Within moments--thank you Smart phones--we learned that a large fire was raging out of control in the forest about 20 miles east of town and due to the intense heat of the past few months, it turned into a fire storm, jumped a river and started a second fire in very dense and difficult terrain.

In less than an hour, the sun was gone, the temperature dropped from 93* to 78* and it went dark, like night, only it was just 2:00 or so in the afternoon. It's really creepy when the sun disappears and takes the blue spectrum with it.  Green colors muted and looked muddy, while red flowers seemed to glow with nuclear B-movie special effects.  It was eerie, everything was changed by this sickly yellow-ish haze that actually distorted your vision, like your brain couldn't process the abnormal light properly.

The yellow-orange darkness lasted for hours until just before sunset when things began to lighten up a wee bit and we could actually see a glimmer of the sun going down in a blaze of livid red over the mountains.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it.  

Because then came the smoke.  It permeated the house, our clothes, the air.  It was choking and acrid and by the time we went to bed we both had sore throats and really bad headaches.  Poor Benny kept sneezing and snorting and spent most of the night under the bed covers.  Nick managed to rig a fan with one of our spare furnace filters so we could finally breathe by shutting ourselves in the bedroom, though this morning the rest of the house reeked like a campfire, minus the fun of melted marshmallows.

I took this last shot from the back deck this morning, a deck covered in ash, smoke heavy in the air, filling the valley below--a valley that you can't even see...

To understand the real impact of the smoke, here's a picture I took just a few months ago of what you should be seeing from the back deck...

We can't finish the bamboo project now as it's totally unsafe to be outside until at least this weekend, or the smoke dissipates, whichever comes first.

And you know, this year has just been one damn thing after another and I'm pretty much done with it.  Still...yesterday was just a taste of the nightmare fires that have plagued California--now Oregon & Washington--and man, my thoughts have been with those folks today while whole towns have burned to the ground.

I guess all we can really do right now is count our blessings, hope for the best, and pray there is light at the end of this long, dark tunnel that has been 2020...