The Market Street draw bridge remained down even though the Delta Queen implied she might want to pass

This morning, the sun was shining and it was a beautiful, if cold, day.  (“Cold,” of course, is relative.  The low was 42 F today.  That’s not really cold, is it?)  However, the sunny day turned into a gray and then rainy afternoon.

When Tisen and I took our evening walk, it was barely “spitting” (as my relatives used to call it) as we started down our usual route.  By the time we made it to the river, it was spitting pretty darn hard.  This caused me to rush Tisen through our walk.  It didn’t take a lot of coaxing–Tisen is not fond of walking in the rain.

As we double-timed through the park, Tisen suddenly did a reverse maneuver, probably having caught the scent of another dog that he felt compelled to try to out-mark.  In the process, he spun me around, causing me to look up in the increasing rain.  I saw a surprising site.  I saw a huge plume of dark smoke rising over the Market St bridge.  My first thought was that a car on the bridge had exploded.

Smoke billows in the wind over the bridge

Perhaps it seems extreme to assume a car had exploded.  However, having had the experience of being awakened in the middle of the night by the percussion of an exploding car a few years ago, exploding cars seem more probable to me than they once did.

That was quite a night.  I ran outside in my pajamas and tried to get close enough to the burning car to see if anyone was inside who needed to be pulled out.  But the fire was burning so hot, I had to step back while I was still many yards away.  This turned out to be a good thing because the car kept having more (smaller) explosions as various tanks and tubes reached combustion temperatures.

The big boom was apparently the gas tank exploding.  Fortunately, there wasn’t anyone inside.  It was a car that someone had reported stolen that had been dumped and burned in front of our property (fortunately a wooded side lot and not in front of our house) back in Columbus.  We always suspected some kind of insurance fraud, but I have no idea how it turned out.

View through Renaissance Park to the Market St Bridge

In any case, it wasn’t an exploding car today.  Rather, it was a rare sight.  It was smoke pouring out of the Delta Queen smoke stack from just behind the bridge.  While it doesn’t make such a dramatic image against the gray sky, I had to run upstairs and get a shot for posterity’s sake.  The Delta Queen was once a glorious river boat, but it’s been a stationary floating hotel for a lot of years now.  I’m at a loss to explain why it would have stoked its fires when it never goes anywhere.

Whatever the reason they decided to light the fire in the Delta Queen, I’m glad no cars exploded.  That would have been awfully messy up on the bridge.

Tisen attempts to smile for the camera