The photos in this post are of the many Washington wildfires burning throughout the state. The narrative excerpts are from a wonderfully written novel I just finished reading last night, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan.
They found themselves driving into a strange night. Coming round a corner the black sky gave way to a huge, red wall of fire, perhaps half a mile away, flames rising far above them. This was a new fire, roaring up from a different direction, and it seemed to be joining several smaller fires into a single inferno. The noise of it was overwhelming.
Within minutes the fire front had caught up with them, and now he drove between walls of flame on either side, around burning tree limbs falling everywhere, past houses exploding. Past fallen wires and flaming car wrecks.
A fireball, the size of a trolley bus and as blue as gas flame, appeared as if by magic on the road and rolled towards them...tyres squealing on bubbling black bitumen, the noise only occasionally audible in the cacophony of flame roar and wind shriek, the weird machine gun-like crackling of branches above exploding.
...there was now nothing except smoking tin and ash and a naked chimney. Where Mrs. McHugh had been chopping down her fence to save her house, it was hard to know in the smoke where either had been.
