Fun with nature

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. As it happened, while I was completely sunk into the adventures of Locke Lamora, Real Life decided to get a lot more interesting.

My parents, whom I'm visiting, live in Hood River, Oregon. They have a house on a suburban street, but it is very close to the Oregon wilderness. I was sitting out on their back porch, enjoying the view of Mount Adams across the Columbia River, when my dad said "look at that smoke."

I looked and saw a huge billowing cloud of smoke coming from the west. At the time I couldn't tell if it was a house or the woods that were burning. What was disturbing was that the smoke was blowing directly toward us.

I went outside and a block down to where the forest started. I could see that flames were coming from the trees, and already frighteningly close to houses only a couple of blocks down from us.

The enemy here was the same thing that had brought my father here in the first place: the wind, which rushes up Columbia Gorge and makes this area the top sailboarding location in the continental United States (Maui is number one).

Things got bad enough that we actually had to evacuate the house. Jeffrey was freaking out, afraid that the house was going to burn down. Since there was nothing we could do about it, we went to Elliot Glacier Brew Pub, which was having their tenth anniversary, and has a huge backyard for kids to run around in.

The house was fine; it was never in any serious danger. But it was scary there for a moment. Also, Locke came out fine, but then you'd expect that because how could Lynch do another Gentleman Bastards book?