Tuesday, October 06, 2009


I'm at the Haiku Retreat at Asilomar and sound asleep. The smoke alarm goes off and then stops and then goes off again, We can smell something acrid, like burning wiring, and when we go outside and look back into the room, we can see a little smokiness gathering under the peaked roof. There are no phones in the room, but we call the front desk and the Fire Department is summoned. Three engines lit the paarking lot almost as bright as day and finally discovered that the wall heater, which comes on at 50 degrees (we hadn't bothered to turn it on) had finally tired of trying to force heated air out into the bed and bedspread which had been pushed against it for a long time. There were no flames or actual ignition, but it is trying to move rooms in the middle of the night, with only token help from the one staff member on duty. I didn't think the pictures would come out and I didn't start soon enough, but the pictures turned out better than I thought they would. This one best demonstrates the feeling of the brightly lit parking lot.

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