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Nature sends us a wake-up call. It?s gone now, and none of the pictures quite captured what it was like. I live in Oakland, and none of the photographs taken in the Bay Area yesterday accurately depict what it was really like ? the sickly, hideous orange of the sky, the creeping feeling of dread, the uncanny disquiet when the sun simply ? didn?t rise. It wasn?t just that iPhones filtered out the hellish color that skies simply shouldn?t be. It was the way it stayed as dark as predawn all day until, abruptly, it was evening, and then bedtime ? like an all-day eclipse. It was the way the sky was so much bigger and wider and more awesomely present than something that is usually so dull and cloudy and dark has any right to be. The pictures you saw shared online looked exactly like apocalyptic movies, like the sepia filter Hollywood uses to make Mexico, India, and the Middle East look like Blade Runner 2049. But that familiarity was misleading. This looked like nothing you?ve ever seen. Like nothing you?d ever want to see. We closed the windows (of course), but also closed the shades and lowered the blinds, and looked away from the eerie bloody gold light creeping through the gaps. We looked at the clock to remind ourselves of what time it was and were never quite convinced. We stifled our brains? flight responses and were careful to only panic on social media. We stayed indoors. We didn?t walk the dogs. We wait...