The exercise:
Write about: night and day.
A new wildfire sparked between Osoyoos and Oliver shortly before I left work this afternoon. It grew rapidly and was spewing some pretty significant smoke as I was driving home. This resulted in what felt like night time to my left, where the sun was struggling to be seen through the smoke, and day time to my right, where blue sky could still be seen.
It also resulted in my car being covered with ash at 9 pm where it is parked, on the north side of our town house, in Penticton, despite the blaze burning some 50 km to the south.
I mean, there's also the huge fire burning near Okanagan Falls 20 km to the south, but I'm fairly confident this is from the new one.
2 comments:
I knew that the wildfires had started again, though with the heatwave you've just had that was kind of a given. It sounds like you're having the same kind of thing as most years, though I believe the wildfires are worse this year? Either way, I doubt Betty enjoyed being covered in ash ;-)
Night and Day
The world was relieved when the asteroid that came blazing into the solar system missed the earth. Initial predictions were so gloomy that they sparked a wave of suicides across the globe, so politicians promptly put the predictions on a need-to-know basis and made the suicides worse. When they finally figured out, after much prompting from the scientists involved, that they should be allowing the predictions to be known but only with interpretation provided, the earth's population had dipped by 10%. The asteroid, which turned out to be the size of a planet, shot past earth while the politicians were still arguing over whose fault it was that so many millions of people had died.
The planet did affect the earth though; jostling it in its orbit and pulling it very slightly further out than usual. The moon also got dragged about a bit and was pulled a little further away from earth, and rotated slightly. The tidal locking remained, but for the first time in a very long time a different side of the moon now faced the earth. Which would have excited astronomers if they weren't all busy trying to work out the climate implications for earth's new orbit -- a little cooler eventually, but all the jostling might be warming things up in the short term.
And then the planet only narrowly missed Venus, swung around the sun much closer than anyone had anticipated, barely scraped by Mercury (and sent it into an early death spiral into the sun; five million years from now and Venus would be the closest planet to the sun in the solar system) and managed another tight orbit of the sun before popping out a bit further. And bursting into flame as it did so.
Burning for a few decades would have been managable: it would have been a bright spot in the sky. But whatever was in or on that asteroid, somehow the fires turned nuclear and the planet, swinging through the asteroid belt on the other side of Mars, swept up enough material to turn into a tiny sunlet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and burning up the asteroid belt in the process. It might have seemed like a clean-up operation except that it was usually close enough to earth, and gave off enough light, to turn night into day. The only time the new light was really gone was when it was on the far side of the sun to the earth, which lasted for three days out of every sixty. All the rest of the time there was daytime and near-daytime.
And it got hotter, of course.
Greg - earlier start this year. Normally we get rain in June but instead we got no rain and record breaking heat. So the fires, not too surprisingly, started early. And we've got a long way to go before we can reasonably expect to see rain again.
Also: full credit on remembering Betty's name.
Honestly, this scenario would be a pretty fitting end to our recent chaos. I'll just it wouldn't surprise me at this point.
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