Happy New Year once again! It’s been quiet here on ye olde bloge, for a variety of reasons. Foremost, I’m in my mid-30s now and things are just… busier. I have a handful of posts in the works but they’ll come out when they come out. Maybe one of these days I’ll catch everyone (lol) up on what’s been going on, but that will have to wait until our major projects get closer to wrapping.
In the meantime, enjoy these 46 photos from 2023, my favorites from the limited batch I took last year. I do unfortunately find myself carrying around my camera less and less these days as well, but thankfully I had an incredible honeymoon to pull most of these from. I should probably have just titled this “Hawaii in Photographs…” Alas, there are a few from other places as well! It was a good year, despite the dearth of content. Perhaps, there’s an inverse correlation there… Anywhoo, please enjoy!
September 9th, 2020 was an unforgettable day. It was a Wednesday, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in San Francisco.
I awoke as usual, around 7:30am, in preparation for my workday at home. At that time, the sun would just be creeping up above the hills east of my house, casting indirect light throughout the backyard, and in turn setting a white glow around the blackout curtains in our west-facing bedroom window.
That didn’t happen on this day, but it’s not unusual for late-summer mornings to be enveloped by a thick, Pacific fog. I thought nothing of the darkness as my brain came to.
When I stepped out of the room, I stopped dead in my tracks. My jaw fell to the floor. Outside, it was orange. A dark, simmering orange. It was as if, like Deimos at the end of Doom’s second episode, we had been transported to Hell itself. I had never seen anything like it.
I opened the window, just to make sure this wasn’t a bizarre trick of the glass. In rare moments such as these, reasonable thoughts tend to disappear. Outside was silent. The air was normal, aside from the ominous glow. The normally vibrant colors of the street were dampened into shades of brown and black.
It didn’t take long to realize what was happening. See, 2020 was a particularly bad summer for wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest. It’s not uncommon at this time of year for wildfire smoke and ash to float hundreds to thousands of miles from the forests of the Sierras and Cascades down to the Bay Area, depositing grey snow on our vehicles and plants, and making the air smell unmistakably of a campfire.
But it was never like this. Smoke sometimes floats high up in the sky, choking the usually white sunlight into a dull yellow-orange cast; other times, it’s akin to fog, reducing visibility, but still allowing weak, diffused light through. In both cases, it smells.
On this day, there was no light. The ubiquitous orange didn’t cast shadows. The air smelled “clean.” There was no ash on my car. Just a dim, unsettling stillness, like the sky was quietly on fire.
I walked outside into the middle of the street and shot photos. Both of my phone cameras had a frustrating, and I should note extremely powerful, automatic white balance that each were able to restore the world to an almost normal hue. Obviously, that defeats the purpose, so I discarded them for my point-and-shoot and set it to manual.
It was 8:30am, yet too dark to employ a shake-proof shutter speed.
I went for a walk around the block, to the edge of the hills and back. Even though the air didn’t smell of smoke, I made sure to wear a mask anyway, just in case. Thank the pandemic for having them around in the first place. I’m sure they did little against whatever smoke particulates were out there, but anything is better than nothing, I reasoned.
As my roads slid away down the hill, the space above was filled with a thick, yellow fog. It floated there basically like normal, if you ignored the color. There were a few other curious explorers on the sidewalks with me, looking around in all directions in disbelief. Cars passed through here and there, more or less at the density of a normal day in the neighborhood during COVID. I paused to take advantage of the low light by capturing their headlights in long-exposure trails.
Once I got home, I settled into my “office” in the living room, Slacking co-workers about the morning and patiently watching the skies through the window for any signs of improvement. Word came in that it was like this everywhere in the Bay Area. In Oregon, it was an even more hellish shade of red.
By 11am, it felt darker than the morning. Still no sun. Was this our life now? In a year as metaphorically hellish as 2020 had been, did we, one random day in September, finally fall into the literal abyss?
At noon, things finally started to turn slightly lighter. Once 3pm rolled around, the sky was a pale, dull yellow — I searched for the shrouded disc of the sun in the western sky to no avail. But with the orange having lifted into a more “normal” smoggy appearance, the mystifying novelty was over. Indeed, once the next day came around with still-yellow skies, but with the addition of an inescapable, headache-inducing campfire smell to boot, I started praying for rain to scrub the air.
But I’ll never forget the sight of that morning as long as I live. In terms of natural phenomena, it’s easily the second craziest f#?cking thing I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes. The first being, of course, the total solar eclipse in 2017. Both were unbelievable in their own ways — whereas the full world-transforming majesty of the eclipse was fleeting, in this case, I had no choice but to sit and contemplate the orange. In retrospect, it wasn’t so bad. It goes even better with a soundtrack:
However, the ultimately worrying part of this episode remains: as the climate changes and wildfires grow stronger and more numerous, this unsettling occurrence may become more commonplace. Next time, we may not be so lucky as to have “breathable” air. Hopefully, that day never arrives.
And so he spoke... 