music: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, IV. Gewitter, Sturm: Allegro
Armen watched, and then he called out to Sam. Sam turned to him, his eyes glowing with excitement, and he turned back to the updrafts, and the cloud over the Sergeant broke with a cracking, pounding violence that could knock a man onto his heels. Armen turned and fled to shelter, as the storm began to assault the Sergeant, or rather, the Anvil. Armen turned for a final look at his friend, and saw him still standing amid the blackness and flashes of light. The wind danced gracefully amid the hammering thunderclaps and flashes.
When he got down to El Portal, he went to the pay phone at the post office and made a call. “Sue?” he began, paused, and said, “he’s here. I just saw him. I—I don’t know.”
He sat in his cabin, upon his bed, with a fifth of bourbon in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other. He took a drink, and stood up to walk outside, where he saw the Anvil smoking, and just then three green CDF trucks sped up the canyon. He sat and leaned against the cabin and lit up.
On Aug. 7, intense thunderstorms lashed Yosemite’s western edge, sparking more than a dozen blazes. Despite intensive firefighting efforts, several of the blazes grew uncontrollably, destroying the community of Foresta near the park boundary.
Science News, October 27 1990
The bombers appeared soon after the smoke, but not soon enough. In what seemed like no time at all, the canyon was choked with orange smoke, temperatures at canyon bottom had dropped for lack of daylight, and Foresta was no more.
Van Wagtendonk, like many other fire specialists, had expected the prescribed burns to prevent such a blowup. “We had all thought that when the crown fire got to an area that had been prescribed-burned, it would drop to the ground,” he recalls. “I had thought that without the large amounts of surface fuels there, there would not have been enough heat to sustain a crown fire.
“But it didn’t care what was on the ground.”
Science News, October 27 1990
After he burned through the cigarette, he stepped back into his cabin and lay down. There was much noise outside the door. Knocks and shouts about evacuation. Cars starting. Sirens. Distant explosions. Trucks roaring by. A motorcycle decelerating nearby. A knock. “Sam? Sam? They said this your cabin. You in there?”