Where There's Smoke, There's Me

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Yesterday afternoon at the gym I was warming up my muscles on the rowing machine when I saw a live report of a wildfire on one of the overhead televisions. The closed captioning wasn’t working and I was too far away (and too near-sighted) to read just where the blaze had broken out. Still, something about the scene rang familiar as I moved to the Nautilus equipment to work my arms and abs.

Here’s what I was watching.

If you drive about a quarter of a mile south of our new home, you’ll see the charred grounds of a June wildfire that roared up one canyonside to within inches of homes. This fire’s different from another one in the same area the month before that. And, now there’s apparently another smoldering burn line just to the east of us. That’s three wildfires within a mile of our house, all within the last two months.

Somehow rattlesnakes no longer seem as worrisome, though goodness knows where all those creepy critters are headed now.

Photo credit: San Diego Natural History Museum

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