It is fucked up when you don't feel safe in your own home. Fucked up. Makes me ponder how awful it would be to live in a place ridden with crime or controlled by a corrupt government or where the rule of law is so shaky that someone unscrupulous could come in and snatch away your well-being.
Go to Syria or watch a fire the size of Long Island rip through your backyard? Shee-it. Give me my passport. I have the tools to handle Syria.
Today I'm going to take our suitcases back out to the shed. I am going to put away my little pile of valuables and documents. Maybe. Unless I see a new tower of smoke being constructed upwind.
These firefighters around here are amazing. I know that putting out something burning is always dangerous but in this part of the country, in the dry season, with humidity in the single digits, with the wind whaling, the fires are explosive. If you've never seen a super-heated house suddenly explode into flame . . . . It looks like an incendiary bomb detonating. A wall of fire blows out.
Backdraft: A phenomenon in which a fire that has consumed all available oxygen suddenly explodes when more oxygen is made available, typically because a door or window has been opened.
Where I grew up leaves fell from trees and - if you didn't rake them up - they'd still be laying . . . lying? . . . done lied? . . . where they landed come . . . came? . . . did comed? . . . Spring. It was damp and wet and snowy and leaves would clump together, mat up, could hang on for years. The forest is covered in a thick humus of dead organic matter. Here, in a few days, a leaf is baked - in the low humidity and relentless UV light - to the consistency of . . . an extremely dry leaf. I can take a handful of leaves in my hand, crumple once or twice, and they are literally gone, in a shower of tiny leaf bits. They fracture. They shatter. They don't bend. They're brittle.
I tried making a compost pile here my first year. I'd throw orange peels and banana skins in, hoping that they'd rot into nice, heavy compost. What happened is that they turned into hard shards of weaponry. I could take an orange skin that had been roasting for a few weeks and cut flesh with it, and I'm not kidding.
Firestorm: An intense and destructive fire in which strong currents of air are drawn into the blaze, making it burn more fiercely.
The city of Dresden was bombed with 4,000 tons of incendiary bombs during WWII, killing tens of thousands of people. The fire was so intense and so relentless in its pursuit of new oxygen that it moved faster than people could run.
SuperK has her own office. She has the tendency to yell "Goddammit!" or "Omigod!" some other expletive, usually when she can't open a web page or a politician annoys her. I've asked her to refrain for a little while. My mind instantly leaps to "fire has started in the next block" or some such awful shit.
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