A sustained collection of flames strangely flew up from the familiar scenery in front of me, ranging throughout this park landscape visitors so often sought in late spring or the start of summer for its usually green scenery and sense of serenity. The blaze, rising higher than I had expected, easily reached to the serrated line of upper limbs in nearby trees still mostly lacking leaves, many branches yet totally skeletal in early April. Narrow tips of treetops spiked the blue sky and quickly ignited like slim candle wicks when fueled by contact with a lit match. Though walking forty or more yards away, I already felt the fire’s severity. This morning its magnitude was displayed by the concentration of those evident hues frequently associated with high temperatures on the color wheel spectrum: the fierce red of flaring ore in a factory’s blast furnace, the burning orange of a setting midsummer sun, and that glowing gold on the surface of a molten lava flow. The clear air I’d observed upon awakening to the first shafts of light at dawn had filled with a heavy gray haze lazily drifting from those scattered masses of ash now almost the color of grimy marsh mud baked under a summer sun. Clouds of smoke floated slowly overhead toward the north, eventually to be directed by stiffer breezes beyond the nearby Lake Michigan shoreline and to shift across the fairly tranquil waters before dissipating in the distance.
Fire
Fire
Fire
A sustained collection of flames strangely flew up from the familiar scenery in front of me, ranging throughout this park landscape visitors so often sought in late spring or the start of summer for its usually green scenery and sense of serenity. The blaze, rising higher than I had expected, easily reached to the serrated line of upper limbs in nearby trees still mostly lacking leaves, many branches yet totally skeletal in early April. Narrow tips of treetops spiked the blue sky and quickly ignited like slim candle wicks when fueled by contact with a lit match. Though walking forty or more yards away, I already felt the fire’s severity. This morning its magnitude was displayed by the concentration of those evident hues frequently associated with high temperatures on the color wheel spectrum: the fierce red of flaring ore in a factory’s blast furnace, the burning orange of a setting midsummer sun, and that glowing gold on the surface of a molten lava flow. The clear air I’d observed upon awakening to the first shafts of light at dawn had filled with a heavy gray haze lazily drifting from those scattered masses of ash now almost the color of grimy marsh mud baked under a summer sun. Clouds of smoke floated slowly overhead toward the north, eventually to be directed by stiffer breezes beyond the nearby Lake Michigan shoreline and to shift across the fairly tranquil waters before dissipating in the distance.