life on mars

I'm rather used to waking up petrified. Trains whistling in the nearby field were the staple cause when I was younger, but nightmares generally do the job these days. And the "dear-goodness-I-think-I-accidentally-poisoned-myself" routine makes a causal appearance from time to time as well. (This week's instance involved kitchen cleaning fluids, which really provides yet another compelling strike against domesticity.)

So, no, waking up petrified is not unusual. What was different this time is that I actually had a pretty justifiable cause. You tell me you wouldn't panic if you woke up in a foreign country on the other side of the world from all your family and discovered that at 6:30 am the sky and air outside was vivid reddish orange. And not only that, everything was still and calm except for ambulance sirens.

Coming straight from a Bible study on spiritual warfare, one my initial reactions (there were multiple, simultaneous ones) was: belt of truth, belt of truth, I knew I should have read my Bible before going to bed! Has Jesus come and not taken me? Where are the other Christians? Is it this red in America, too? I almost called my family, half to see if they were still there and half to see if they were seeing red, too. It was about this point it struck me that if they, too, were seeing red, that would definitely mean God was up to something rather weighty (when is He not, come to think of it?), and that this would really show His greatness and glory in all the earth, and in some ways I was quite eager for this to be the case. In others, I was quite eager for those eye drops I'm on for conjunctivitis to have been backfiring in very bizarre ways. (I ruled this out, however, when I realized that everything in my room was still its normal hue.)

It was somewhere in the midst of this panicking that, thankfully, other, evidently slightly more meteorlogically aware individuals, had rushed out with cameras to capture the images. I wish I had, too, but, I was staying safely scared to death in bed, thank you very much.

It did occur to me that I could check Facebook to see what the worldwide reaction was (and, clearly, it was the option many people chose). If you've got to die (or live in red-tinted world), I reasoned, you might as well do it with dignity. For that reason I opted to wait it out until 8:15, at which time I could reasoned I could test the "where are the Christians?" theory as my Bible study leader was due to stop by and pick up a notebook he'd accidentally left.

Imagine then my relief to hear a very normal knock on the door somewhere after eight. The sky had actually pallored significantly by then (I'd been keeping a sleepy eye on it at irregular intervals -- 6:30 not, mind you, being my peak hour, particularly on my morning off; actually how I'd woken then remains a bit of a mystery as I'm generally quite capable of sleeping through a vast array of meteorological phenomena. I think perhaps it had more to do with my body's built-in "this might be a fun moment to panic" feature than anything.) but I was still quite relieved to see Adam alive and in the non-resurrected flesh (though, presumably had he been resurrected he'd have had less of a pressing need to get his notebook back) who assured me that yes, the red was spectacular and that actually it was caused by dust. I pretended that of course that was a very obvious explanation I understood perfectly, then went promptly to the internet to sort things out properly.

I had by now decided resolve was no longer necessary and immediately reverted to Facebook, where I quickly got the latest atmospheric updates, not to mention amusing atmospheric quips (which are not, I hasten to add, quips you come by every day).

In short, there was a huge dust storm in Sydney and this dust happened to look red when the sun was at about the 6 to 7 am angle, then gradually (I could have told you this from my sleepy, irregular optical observations) got more yellow and then more normal by work time. It caused any number of visibility problems, particularly concerning all forms of transportation, but relatively few major dramas, apart from a few asthmatics who experienced more respiratory trouble than usual, and the 470 extra phone calls received by the fire department.