Fire Smoke

We’ve been routinely waking up to the smell of campfire, and not in a good way.

Last year I had this idea of creating a video series to accompany this site, and I actually produced a couple early episodes, where I would have a sit around a campfire — maybe in my backyard, maybe in the woods, or maybe in a park somewhere where you can do that sort of thing — crack a beverage, cook some food, and enjoy the mood.

That channel would have been on hiatus this month because there is a number of cascading fire bans in place all around me. No open flames. No solid fuel fires. No burning of any kind.

Why?

The hot and dry conditions, strange for May, have resulted in an early and angry wildfire season.

My phone pings with alerts routinely noting local evacuation watches for small zones just outside of the city, people being told to be ready to run because a fire is looming close enough to their rural homes that they may be in danger at the whim of the wind direction.

Inside the city we’re relatively safe, though there have been a couple of major house & yard fires that have resulted in multiple adjacent properties in our suburbs burning out of control.

So. Fire ban.

Don’t burn anything.

Yet, as relatively protected as we are here, there is one aspect to wildfires that won’t be stopped by meandering rivers or highways breaking the burn. The smokey air goes where it pleases, and so as the atmosphere fills with particulate carbon, ash, and who knows what other dangerous chemicals (formerly trees) that poof into the sky as wildfires rage, that smoke swirls into and descends on the whole province, city, town, and rural land alike, and makes for a gloomy (as my kid would put it, post-apocalyptic) atmosphere… literally.

Small beans, I know, compared to the loss of property and ecology that is happening just over the horizon, but I’ve been attempting to train for a marathon these last few months. My runs have been getting longer and more intense. The volume of air I need to suck into my still recovering-from-COVID lungs is increasing by the workout. This becomes a ridiculously frustrating calculation as the days press on and I skip a few sessions here and there citing air quality and the inverse effects of training in smoke. Again, small beans in the grand schemes, but it does make me think about the impact on anyone who isn’t a mostly healthy middle aged man, someone with compromised health, asthma or whatever. If it’s too bad for me, it’s really bad for many more.

The weather spirits need to summon us a week of rain to quench the fires and wash the smoke out of the air, and no one is too sure if that will happen.

The Brink

A couple weeks ago I stood at the edge of a cliff, half way up a mountain, looking west across a smoky haze shrouding the setting sun as it cast an eerie pall upon the landscape.

As the summer forecast creeps into higher and higher temperatures, the meteorologists are predicting that we’re entering another span of unseasonably hot temperatures for the third time in two months.

Smoke and heat. The world is burning, literally and figuratively.

And just yesterday the United Nations released another climate report, ringing the warning bell yet again to a mostly indifferent world, politicians with their heads locked into timespans of election cycles, not generational catastrophe.

In fact the little man who calls himself the leader of our province stood on a podium in front of the media yesterday and called the effort to adapt our energy habits to a changing climate that is literally killing us “a utopian impossibility.” Hardly a rousing, inspirational speech as much as a shrug and a “why bother even trying” approach. I have many reasons not to vote for his party, but the doubling down on the very thing that is destroying us has cemented my resolve.

I don’t like to get political here, but my dream of a fantastic vaccinated summer camping, cooking, and exploring has been trampled by air filled with so much smoke that it’s dangerous to go outside, temperatures so hot that my head pounds after a few minutes of exertion, and a head-in-the-sand, anti-vax ignorance that has stumbled us all into what should have been a completely avoidable approaching fourth wave of pandemic.

And now the understated conclusion from the UN report of our headlong rush into climate disaster and destruction of our fragile ecosphere tells me little more than that the rest of my life will be much of the same, if not worse, and as we hand things off to my daughter’s generation… well, let’s just say that the looming sense of nihilism I’ve been feeling over the last day has been justifiably gripping.

Travel broadens the mind and enriches the soul, and in travelling we learn that we are but small, temporary beings that have but a passing moment in a vast and complex society that is itself but a speck in an infinitely more complex universe.

We are mere passengers for a brief time on a world that neither needs us nor will adapt itself to us, and we are shaping that world for ourselves in a way that seemingly leaves us unable to survive in the singular place in that whole complex universe that will abide us.

Warm weather is nice. And yes, the smoke offers a unique opportunity for hazy romantic photos of the glowing red sky from atop a mountain hike. Yet, I would trade it all in the blink of an eye for a little bit more hope in our future.