Wild Fire at Angeles Crest (& a Flaming Convocation)

Bill Viola (link: http://www.billviola.com/) spoke today at the Otis faculty convocation. Insights from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Buddha, and the Dali Lama. He showed us a piece from his collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the opera Tristan and Isolde. It's a video, normally projected 30 feet high (but for us, about 5 feet high), that represents the last images in a dying man's mind's eye. (Viola said "mind's eye." I feel uncomfortable using it.) A figure is silhouetted against a massive wall of flames, falls forward into a body of water, and the flames gradually morph into rippling water.

Meanwhile, there's this wild fire blazing back at home, just a jog over in Angeles Crest National Forest (link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/08/angeles-national-forest-blaze-threatening-ranger-station.html). The fire changed directions since yesterday and is therefore heading this way, threatening a Rangers' Station and nearing peoples' homes. After dinner and Mad Men (we've started the series from the beginning via Netflix), BP, Violet, and I went for a walk. The sight of the smoke and fire kept me at the verge of tears, and not just because smoke burns your eyes. Those helicopters, planes, and tankers look like tiny gnats. The word that comes to mind is "futile" when I see how puny a literal ton of water appears up there, but I know that firefighters routinely contain these things. It never seems easy. Fighting. Nevertheless, I feel confident that we'll be safe—that they'll stop the fire before it gets this far. This kind of thing definitely makes me get the whole heroic fireman image.

As for the pictures, first is our house at dusk with smoke. Awed by the smoke alone.


Next, we crossed the street to see the flames have definitely advanced. That's our green house. Not it's most flattering angle.


Walked two blocks north to our main drag, Foothill Blvd. View across Von's grocery store parking lot. You can see the light from one of the planes as well as what I think is a firetruck or tanker.


Below, Von's again, but a view that better shows the visible width of the fire. The other pictures don't show the flames at the west (left) end.


At the intersection of Foothill and Pennsylvania Ave. Dad will be happy to see that there's a dentist on the corner. (He notes that dentists always seem to have corner offices here.)


The air quality, as you can imagine, is terrible. If we didn't know better, we'd think our next-door neighbor's house was burning to the ground. (BP, I'm biting my lip.)