Burn Baby Burn
The pillar of cloud would not move away from before the people during the day, nor the pillar of fire at night.
I noticed driving home that the clouds were odd. In the land of big sky, you get used to every sort of cloud.
North of the city, out over the land toward the Red River, a huge plume of clouds covered the sky at least out to the Oklahoma border. It was kind of glorious, but the color was off. Instead of the usual blue/grey the clouds had a sickly yellow tint to them. Even some dark grey floating around.
It wasn't until I got a few miles closer that I could see the column connecting the clouds to the ground about 15 miles out.
It was an impressive fire, and thankfully out in the middle of nowhere. Though I doubt the terrestrial animals felt like it was the nowhere.
Coming over the bridge where I like to watch the sun set into the railroad tracks, I spotted this crusty old cowboy hat. Pulling off to capture it, I saw that it was well-worn, but not end of life. Some farmer is going to be plenty ticked off that he lost his favorite straw hat.
I left it there so when he comes back, he'll be able to reclaim it.
Standing there in 108º heat, with the sun cooking my back and the smoke burning my nostrils, I was stricken with how beautiful the moment was.
It turns out even hell has a good side.
Given the choice, most sane people would choose a beautiful mountainside with trees and lush grass. Or maybe a beach bungalow where the waves could lull them to sleep.
And I like those things. I think I'd choose them from a lineup. But the old adage 'bloom where you are planted' came to mind. There is good and bad to every place people dwell, but it absolutely floors me that there can be beauty in destruction.
If you gave me an unlimited budget and a capable team as well as all the time I needed to turn someplace into a paradise, I wouldn't choose something where most of the work was already done. Give me a Death Valley, a Badlands or a Dust Meridian any day.
Imagine the thrill of looking back over 20 or 30 years of terraforming and trying to convince people the place was once one of the most avoided locales in the world.
I ran into this heat map a few weeks ago. It shows distance in miles of how far away from a national park you are.
Now, you'll note that NY, FL panhandle and a few others are either red or yellow, indicating that maybe they're ugly places to visit. Nope. Just no parks designated by the federal government.
The streak from Galveston Texas to Minnesota is pretty telling. They don't call them the flyover states for nothing.
Unless you like sunsets. They're pretty glorious.
But imagine turning that corridor into one of the most attractive places on earth.
Now that's a task I could get behind. And I bet you could too.
HOW?
The funny thing about places nobody wants to be? You can get away with pretty much whatever you want. Without making a big deal of it, what if someone planted a few hundred thousand sequoias while no one was looking?
And I'm not saying Yellowstone is going to blow North America off the map, but a little tectonic action out here sure does have the potential to create some new and stunning vistas.
Fire is always gonna' fire. Burn it all down. But you know what? Some pretty damn amazing things come in the wake of destruction.
Look at Mount St Helens.
The richness of the soil in the aftermath is hard to deny.
And I think this applies to us emotionally as well.
We all go through periods where our worlds end. Losing a hat or two, or maybe our heads entirely. A paddock or the whole continent of our heart burns away.
And we, just like the land, are not done.
We're just prepped for what comes next. And sometimes, impossibly, what comes next becomes more precious than what was there before.
Honestly, I'm kind of counting on it.
So, let's stand here for a minute and appreciate that old hat.
Soak in the heat. The smoke. The scorching earth.
Hell has a strange way of making the land fertile again.
There is simply no telling what is going to grow here next.
Let's hope together that it is more glorious than we could have imagined.
Song of the day:
This Too Shall Pass – Okay Go – Of the Blue Color of the Sky (2010)
You know you can't keep letting it get you down And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground