When there is a fire here, it doesn't smell like wood. It is a building, and it isn't supposed to be burning. It smells like old tires or chemicals, and I get nervous and look around for a big black column of smoke. Will you think I am a bad person if I tell you that sometimes, if I can, I follow the smoke and drive to the fire? I remember watching flames consume a small house in Brunswick. I sat in my car, rapt, as the roof collapsed, as the walls changed color and started to sag. Once, in the early spring, I was driving out of Boston and I followed smoke to a boatyard that was on fire in East Boston. There were six or seven firetrucks forming a barrier to the neighborhood, but they had given up on the boats. They were up on jackstands in the parking lot, each with a coating of shrinkwrap, and I watched the greasy black smoke and the huge orange bursts as the fire ate the boats, one by one.
Here's a picture of the way June should be, to cheer you up. It's not too late to move here to Utopia, you know.
