Heavy Smoke Day 2023
It is a heavy smoke day in Central Oregon. Yesterday morning I checked the federal air quality website. Our nearby cities were mostly green and yellow. Some weeks-long fires to the Southwest have had intermittent effects on our mountain views and trip planning. People who work outside have had some tough days.
This afternoon I got to the river to paddle and things were changing. From a rise in the parkway I got a view south and a vast expanse of cloud and smoke was in view. It is a view of nothing, like the Nothing from that movie from the 1980s that eats us when we give up hope and imagination.
In an hour we were wrapped in it as we paddled up the lazy flat section of the Deschutes. A man on a paddleboard with his toddler said there was a “small still” fire just South of Bend.
“We are probably safe, though.”
I thought of Lahaina, and Paradise, and wondered.
Driving home in the dark the street lights looked to be illuminating a gray solid wall. I was driving straight at it, passed through the illusion at each intersection. I could smell the forest even though I was now in the desert to the North. A wild fire in the trees smells like a camp fire. I wondered what burnt biomass I was breathing in right now. The remains of animals, insect colonies, meadows of grasses, small fir trees, massive ponderosa.
An image came to me of the tired charred land under a heavy snow pack.
When I got home I sat outside throwing a ball into the darkness for my dog. I checked the air quality website again. The sensors nearest my home registered purple, unsafe for everyone. In the darkness I can’t make out the smoke with my eyes, but I can with my nose and the tickle in the top of my lungs. We should not be out here, but we keep it up for a little while.
This morning the sky is a sheet gray. I can stare directly at the sun, a simmering orange lump of liquid iron.
I can look into the pasts of people that lived here a long time. Surely smoke choked us before. Surely there were fires 40 years ago on these lands and we woke to flat gray skies.
Before the word anthropocene was at my fingertips, before “human-caused” changes in natural history seemed possible. How far back do you have to go before fires, even big ones, were not a visible sign that we have bent nature. How far back do you have to go to feel cradled in a sense of an intention coming out of the fire. I wonder if it was easier to pass your mind forward to the future — the rest under the snow pack, the clear fall days before that when we hear “one hundred percent contained” on the radio. The green you do always see in spring among the char.
Now the camp fire smell in this desert subdivision is a domino in my mind, and my long life of internal combustion road trips are domino long fallen.
My eyes sting, I have that discomfort still at the top of my chest. I stroll slowly across a field. The dog is eating grass. The mountains have been eaten and I am willing to believe that is possible.
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