Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Curiosity ... the monkey brain is chock full of it, no? So I went upstairs to scan for smoke, and I saw a great big ominous cloud of it to the south and another great big ominous cloud of it to the north. Since I had not yet gotten undressed, I figured I'd wander out to see whether I could see how far away the fires were. No blinkenlights were visible from the corner of Lombard and Fulton, so I decided on a brief drive. I tried north first.

The fire is seven blocks north of me, and the cordoned off area starts three blocks west. Whatever is burning, it's big. It looks like the police have between twelve and twenty blocks closed off with yellow tape or with police cars sitting in intersections. Crossing US40 on Monroe, there's a spot where I could see a ladder truck extended so it looked more like a crane, but I couldn't get a really solid fix on the location and I couldn't really see the building. The closed area starts close to Bon Secours hospital.

There are firehoses strung for several blocks. I saw one run (three hoses side by side) that was at least five blocks long -- I don't know how for north it stretched.

And of course, since this is Baltimore, the middle of the night is a news vacuum. There's no equivalent to WTOP radio in DC, the local television stations don't think there are enough people awake to need to toss in a news bug (and they're almost certainly right), and the talk radio station that throws news reports in every so often is running a syndicated show right now. (Rush Limbaugh, which meant I wasn't about to listen long enough to see whether they stuck in news reports anyhow, but I'm guessing not.) So if I'm lucky, I'll find out what burned where in the morning. It might be big enough for the television news to say something about despite being in the part of town they don't usually bother mentioning fires in. (The times I've tried to find out information about middle-of-the-night, south-west Baltimore fires on the web site for the Baltimore Sun, I haven't spotted anything there, either. But I might just have overlooked a story by failing to guess which section they'd put it in, I dunno.)

I never did find a fire to the south. But I was driving into and out of the smoke. It's a very pretty -- clear and sparkly -- night out there, except for the parts that are seriously smoky, and the parts where the smoke can be mistaken for fog if you don't smell it. Drive two blocks through clear air on Wilkens, spend another three blocks in smog, and suddenly it's clear from the next intersection all the way to the harbour. (Okay, so Wilkens doesn't go that far, but popping north a block and looking east, it was clear all the way to the harbour. So there.) So I think that the smoke I saw out my window to the south was a "clot" of smoke that had drifted from the fire north of me and just stayed unreasonably intact, mysteriously.

I didn't try to get close, and I only took one camera with me -- the number of sirens I had heard and the size of the smoke cloud had already given me the impression that I wouldn't be able to get close enough to see anything, and since all I was really trying to do was find out just how far away the fire was (until seeing how much territory was blocked off made me wonder what was burning, anyhow), it wouldn't have been worth the effort to park outside the traffic perimeter and see how close they'd let me go on foot, even if my knees didn't hurt so much. I just drove around noting where I saw blocked intersections (usually from the next block over) and tried to see where the base of the smoke was.

Anyhow, I should try to turn my brain off and sleep. Where's that damned circuit breaker?