While flying across the country two weeks ago, from San Jose to Chicago, I was reading a book titled "Fire" by Sebastian Junger. The book consists of essays about people willingly putting themselves in dangerous situations, and the first two chapters are about wildfire-fighters - the men and women who combat the hundreds of fires that consume large parts of the western forests. While I was reading these articles, I was thinking about the fact that these men are now fighting some of the worst wildfires in the history of this country. I then realized that we were about to fly over Colorado, where fires had been devastating the woods near Denver. I became fixated on the scenery outside, and within a half hour, I could see huge cloud of smoke coming off a mountainside in the distance. I don't know how big the fire was in terms of what the firefighters were dealing with now, but it certainly put some perspective on what I was reading.