environment

Posted on

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.

Posted on episode 360

Foggy Downtown Breakdown

It’s been foggy this week.

Eerie fog.

The kind of fog that sets in, sinks to the cervices of the city and holds its place.

I drove to work this morning and where usually the sparkling towers of downtown greet me from across the valley, glass and concrete pillars of light twinkling through the morning twilight, today it was just ghostly silhouettes and hints of light pushing through the frozen moisture in the air.

A few hours later I walked to the edge of the valley and took some video of the haunting scene. Normally a view south that reaches across the valley and traces the shapes of the urban sprawl on the other side, this morning an ethereal vanishing point barely stretching to the far side of the river below:

The fog is with us for a few days though.

We are in a scenario where the temperatures above us are warmer than at the surface so the air is trapped close to the ground. No wind, no flow – continual pumping of air pollution -> poorer air quality.

AG, the meteorologist with whom I run

And as a number of sources suggest, it is more than fog. It is a weighty air mass full of poor air.

Folks have been advised not to work or exercise outside.

So.

In the summer we get smoke from forest fires.

In the winter we get killer fog.

So.

That’s our world now.

It certainly is hauntingly pretty though. On another walk for my early lunch I strolled through the city square in front of City Hall, a square named for a British Prime Minister, Churchill. The fog had receded a bit, but the ethereal vibe was still strong there, too.

…basically the air around us is in a stable situation and things are in balance. When things get out of balance that’s when it blows. Kind of similar to life.

RM, another meaty urologist with whom I run

Stay safe, whatever fog descends on you today.

Posted on episode 321

Attack of the Freakish Foliage

As of next week or so, we’ll be celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of moving into our house, our neighbourhood, and this place we call home. Seventeen years is all at once a short blip and a really long time. It sometimes seems like we’ve both lived here forever and also just moved in.

In reality though, a lot has changed. Where I look out my back window and see houses, trees, grass, gardens, birds, and blue sky, on the day we moved in was a construction zone with heaps of clay clumped into piles amongst weeds, lonely streets paved through a blank field, and utility stakes poking from the ground.

We “built” our house, in that we went to a local building company, and from them bought a piece of land, a house plan and contracting services to turn lot and plans and heaps of supplies into a finished home. It took the better part of a year and was simultaneously exciting and frustrating.

Development companies exist largely to do exactly this type of work: turn a chunk of suburban landscape that used to be farms and fields into rows of neat little houses at the edge of the city, and they both do it very well and simultaneously take shortcuts that have long term impacts.

Last year I noticed one of those shortcuts while out on my walk with the dog: a tree planted by the developer had done something that no one had ever intended. It had started turning from a lovely ornamental cherry tree into a scraggly crab apple tree.

Pictured above is actually a single tree.

On the top is green foliage that is starting to spring blossom for a crop of fall apples.

On the bottom (or should I say middle?) is red-hued cherry, an ornamental tree with gorgeous colours year round, and a favourite of developers trying to add colour and splendour to a new neighbourhood.

On the very bottom is the culprit and cause of the mix-up: the fake cherry was actually a graft of cherry branches onto a much hardier crab apple trunk. This was all well and good and no one would ever have known any different. But then droughts and stress and age and seventeen (likely more) years have passed and the cherry bits have been overtaken by new growth from the trunk and now a freakish hybrid of a tree sits at the edge of a small park making passers-by wonder at what the heck is going on.

I’m in no way against tree grafting. I used to have a tree just like this on my front lawn, a cherry trunk grafted with a mismatched collection of less hardy cherry branches. It died after about four years because here on the Canadian prairies life is tough, especially for a mutant tree.

My point, if I actually have one, is that of the downside of taking shortcuts if you’re not going to be around for the long haul.

Shortcuts in life, gardening and most anything else can be time savers and budget buffers. Getting something the quick and easy way can be a nice perk of knowing what matters and what doesn’t.

When building a community, my developer took a shortcut and saved some time, money, and planted a tree that looked great … for a few years. Then they left, went off to build other, newer neighbourhoods, and the community was left with a plant that needed more care and attention than anyone could be bothered to give it. Left to its own, the faux cherry tree has done what nature let it do, in a long, methodical, slow process… revert back to the plant it was always intended to be: a crab apple tree.

Shortcut: zero. Nature for the win.

Had the developer spent a little more care and attention to put in plants that were local (and we have many beautiful trees that grow natively not a few hundred meters away in the river valley) right now there would be a park with something less frankenstein growing at the gate and more fitting for a pretty suburban neighbourhood. But the cherry looked great at the time, sold the idea of suburban paradise to people looking to build lots of new homes, and years and decades later has outlived its purpose.

It was a shortcut, and years later for the long haulers like me, a shortcut to the simple but important reminder that the people who built our community then are not the ones who live in it now and continue to build it today.

Posted on episode 309

Stewards of the Trails

While volunteering as a course marshal at a local trail race yesterday, I stood in the same spot in the woods for nearly three and a half hours. Much of that time was spent clapping and cheering and directing racers away from a detour where the path had naturally washed out near the river bank. But a lot of the rest of that time was me incidentally and casually investigating the condition of the local trails.

The Inspiration

A few weeks ago I watched a mini-documentary video by Beau Miles called Run the Rock, wherein the filmmaker stepped out his front door in his running kit, loaded his wheelbarrow up with tools, and ran about ten klicks out to a remote trail to dig up a rock. The story is told much more thoroughly by Miles in the video but the short version is simply that after a friend tripped over an obstacle on their running path it only seemed right that someone go remove the obstacle.

He did just that.

The nine minute video runs the viewer through the story and motivation behind what turns out to be a kind of drive towards the moral stewardship of the spaces we share.

Miles ran the equivalent of a half marathon, out and back to where a small boulder was protruding from the path, and on the return trip he not only lugged the same boulder clear of the woods but did so knowing that he had done a bit of work to make the trail a safer place for himself, his friends and anyone who used it.

The Parallel

Standing in the woods for three and a half hours yesterday, minding a curve in the path where the intersection of five distinct trails (one of which had been part of the race course until it was washed out by rain last season) gave me a lot of opportunity to inspect the place thoroughly.

In roughly six square meters of trail intersection there was:

… an official survey brass marker the circumference of a tennis ball protruding nearly ten centimeters from the dirt in the middle of one of the paths

… the shards and remains of at least two broken bottles, crunched to bits the size resembling loose change scattered into the dust

… a pothole at the edge of, but still on, one of the paths large enough to place a car tire inside and clearly awkward enough to trip anyone who wasn’t paying attention as they strolled by

The park itself is a bit of reclaimed semi-industrial land that now lies fairly embedded in the southwest suburbs of the city. Remnants of strip mining that ended at least fifty years ago are shrouded like ancient ruins in young tree cover and meandering paths that sometimes lead past chunks of concrete footings. The area is now an off-leash dog park, boat launch, and recreation area snaked through with bike paths, hiking trails and open spaces (great for hosting trail races.)

It’s also well-used and only lightly serviced.

All of which means that if one stops to stare at one’s feet for any length of time it’s going to become obvious that the trail conditions in some of the highest traffic areas are lagging.

The Solution

The answer, if there actually is one, is probably something to do with personal responsibility.

To be fair to the overall condition of the park, the spot where I was stood for the better part of my morning was not only a convergence of many trails and a highly travelled part of the deep trails of the park, but a particularly nice lookout and vantage point high up on the banks of the river looking north. In other words, a lot of people go this way and stop here for a rest or a photo.

Yet, that seems all the more reason that such a spot should be made safer.

Dogs could cut their paws on the broken glass.

Anyone could stumble in the pothole.

A cyclist who hit the protruding survey marker could easily find themselves ass over tea kettle and tumbling down a steep riverbank.

If only someone could find, say, a Friday afternoon later this week when he had the day off work to wander out there with a pair of gloves, a trash bag and maybe even a shovel.

I may need to check the weather forecast to see if that someone is me.