Fire Starter

As my plane touched down over Los Angeles last night on my way back from San Francisco, the pilot pointed out that to our left we could catch a spectacular glimpse of the LA fires. Like a bunch of eager tourists on an urban safari, we turned our heads, piling on top of one another to take a look at the destruction. "Oooohhh... aaahhh." And it was spectacular: little lines of sparkling red light dotting the black canvas below. The woman next to me scoffed, rolling her eyes as she dug her face deeper into her book. Apparently, she was above all of this. We were rubberneckers, and she was a highly sophisticated woman of good breeding who preferred not to make light of the tragedies unfolding on the ground. But what she missed was the beauty of it all, a beauty that was short lived once the plane came to the terminal and smoke started to fill our lungs, causing our throats to swell and our eyes to itch. Once home, I spent hours cleaning the soot off the sills of my open windows and prayed that my poor cat didn't have a case of the black lung. Then watching the endless news coverage and the morning sky fill with an eerie orange and black light, I missed that simple moment, when thousands of feet above the earth, the fires looked like little more than grand city lights.