On New Year's Eve, people peppered the beach at Golden Gardens to bid farewell to 2014 and welcome 2015.

People came from all over Seattle to be near the open maw of Shilshole Bay to view the very last moments of a year as the sun languidly drifted behind far off peaks.

The beach was almost barren aside from a few groups of people around burning pits. They sipped cocoa or beer, and burned Christmas trees. Fires blasted from the beach like phoenix-rivers on Mercury, deluging in streams of flames far up into the dusk air. The dried evergreens crackled and shrunk, contorted in the blaze. The heat left faces tight as drums as the flames dimmed and the cool twilight etched back over them. Glowing embers floated like fire-blossoms above spectator’s heads.

Pale, brittle trees were piled around the pits keeping the procession of light well into the night. People jeered and kept up their laughing and erupted praise as yet another Noble Fir was planted on the heap.

Watching the brilliant light take the evergreen, one could not help but think of the astronomer Giordano Bruno or Joan of Arch at the stake before the crowd, before the infinite.

A man stood another tree in the pit, and a noble husk lit up. When the tree was fully taken by the flame there looked to be a visage of an angel -- Lucifer or Gabriel, one could not tell -- towering overhead.

Between each burn, brave swimmers stripped down to suits and sprinted across freezing rocks that nipped their numb toes. They crashed into Sound. Their abrupt yelps startled even the cats hunting in the bivouacs of blackberry bramble – the stuff of dreams that riots year-round up the bluff behind you.

The swimmers came back to their circle and wrapped towels around their rigid bodies. Yet another fir was placed in the pit, and the people wept and cheered.

In the distance the sun moved along and down across switchbacks and highways beyond the Sound, beyond a mountain range -- the energy going out and cooling. A blonde, thumb-print moon turns over. A year of light came and went and now is back again, slow and inevitable. It phases the broad waters from ebullient orange to barely breathing crimson, and finally blows out in an unburdened dark damson-blue, looming shallowly behind the jagged Olympic spine.