WILDFIRE!
I’ve lived through a hurricane, the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, a number of disastrous Silver Freezes, but overwhelmingly, my memories are of wildfires.
Wildfires are living entities, a ferocious predator. Forests can’t run, and you can feel their terror on the blast furnace wind as the fire consumes them tree by tree.
i have come home after work and seen my house surrounded on three sides (I need to draw that!) to the top of the ridgeline with fire. I have been evacuated from the hills by boat with wildfire racing down the mountain behind me (I need to draw that!).
So much of my remembered history is woven together by tongues of fire.