We’re facing east on Lone Pine Road when my wife asks, “Are you going to take a picture?”
I could take a picture, yes. At 7:00 a.m. the sun is rising in the east. At the end of the road, just above the horizon, the sun is sandwiched between two stands of trees. The sun looks like a peeled nectarine, psychedelic pink, brilliant, beautiful. Also definitely and tragically the wrong color. On my social media accounts last night and the night before, were astonished reports: “Wow!” “Amazing!” “You gotta see this!” along with smart phone photos of the sun setting, with its odd, ravishing color.
Red sun at night, something’s not right.
Red sun in the morning, mankind is screwed.
It feels that way these days, because right now the whole west coast is on fire, and here in the Midwest the smoke has arrived in our upper atmosphere, between 15,000 and 30,000 feet, not a cloud in a sky that should be blue this morning. It’s not. Our sky is airborne-disaster gray, the sun an over-ripe fruit.
Every morning I take pictures–of trees, berries, leaves, flowers, fungi, of the deer if they let me. I want this picture of the sun, I really do, almost as much as I don’t want it. We’re not supposed to see a sun that looks like this. It’s not natural.