Birds Sang from Blackened Trees

 

Tucker Nichols, a California artist, wrote and illustrated this "article" in the New Yorker.  I love the artwork, the layout, and the text.  In the online version, the format is different.  Some of the images are bigger; there are two more paintings.

Last year, the Caldor wildfire burned through a wide swath of California’s Eldorado National Forest, an area in the central Sierra Nevada that I hike every summer. I returned in August, exactly one year after the fire started, and found a Pompeiian landscape: charred stumps, sooty ponds, thick drifts of ash. A firefighter told me that clifftops a thousand feet high had glowed red from the light of the flames. In a meadow, I gathered pieces of burned willow to use as charcoal for drawing. A clear creek cut through fresh growth. From behind the branches of a thicket, a deer stared at me, unmoving. Birds sang from blackened trees; the wind scattered seeds. The sky was as blue as ever.