Photo of the Dove Fire shortly after ignition
"By September the foothills were worn out from the deprivations of the dry season, and everything waited breathlessly for rain. The dusty trails in our canyons were covered with the riverine tracings of whiptail lizards and racer snakes, and although it was still hot, there was a certain aging of the light. The smoke from burning stubble on the rice fields down in the valley backed up against the mountains, and the lowering slant of the sun through it brought a nameless melancholy to the mornings of the well-adjusted, and to the desperate, more desperation. What had you done, now that the year was three quarters gone? What had your life come to? What of the New Year's resolutions you'd made?"
-Jordan Fisher Smith, Nature Noir