Bambling

Excerpt from an e-mail of explanation sent to Anna after an early morning Gchat in which I’m sure I made no sense:
“[...] last night Devil’s Peak basically went up in flames. I was killing time on Facebook, about to go to bed, when one of the other interns knocks on my door and just bursts in. About that moment was when I started to smell smoke. The entire mountain had disappeared: a puff (maybe a plume?) of grey-ish orange, occasionally red smoke just rolling out onto the entire city. So, like anyone who’s lost their mind, we headed out there.

“I spent about 4 hours runing around in the smoke and embers (seriously, blowing embers SUCK). [...] By the time I got home I couldn’t actually focus my eyes, they were so full of ash. My hair was standing on end with soot and the smoke inhalation made me want to vomit. It took me an hour just to import my photos for filing, a mix of exhaustion and near-blindness. The photos I ended up sending in were complete crap (though only mildly worse than most of what I had … none of it was too good, sadly).”

My eyes are still burning (although the eyedrops help) and most of my photos were, in fact, crap. A mix of out-of-focus and just missing the moment and (here’s the odd one) not moving deep enough into the scene. That last one is what bothers me: I always move closer. I have a fairly blatant disregard for my own safety a lot of the time. But something about the smoke and the embers and the exhaustion … I just didn’t have it in me to give 100%. Oh well. There’ll always be more fires.

My favorite photo from the night, and it doesn't tell the story in the slightest. Le sigh.

Tags: Devil's Peak, fire, Times/Argus

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 00:53 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.