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BLACK CHROME
A steady drizzle falls from leaden skies the week after a prescribed burn in Yellowstone National Park. As I wander into the burn, soggy ash surrounds the deadfall and cakes onto my boots. Skeletons of burned saplings and brush stand wavering like underwater plants. Small wisps of smoke still rise here and there, or perhaps it is only fragments of fog forming. All around large logs lay in overlapping piles, some quite random, some more orderly as if placed there in the shape of operations symbols from some unknown mathematical language of forestry. Where the logs cross the fire burned hotter, creating deep notches in the bottom log, or burning clear through. The rain polishes the charcoal surface of the logs, causing the deep black to glow with reflected light like black chrome.
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