Reflections on an Orange Sky
Those photos out of New York City from last week are the definition of apocalyptic. The Statue of Liberty shrouded in a cloudy haze and a deep orange backdrop conjures images of every dystopian movie that featured snapshots of well-known landmarks amidst a sci-fi apocalypse hellscape. To see something like that in real life feels unreal. It feels especially awful when it’s happening this early in June when the winter snow runoff is, in theory, supposed to protect forests from this kind of devastation.
Alas, the first thing that went through my mind upon seeing the screenshots of the AQI levels and the orange sky was “250 AQI, that’s nothing!” I stopped myself after that first thought and reflected on how twisted that reaction is. The section of the book I’m working on this week had me going back to September 2020 when the massive Oregon wildfires brought us toxic air reaching over 500 AQI. The poisonous air levels had reached so high they were literally off the charts.
To validate this thought, though, my friend Alli, who lives in Missoula, Montana sent this text to me and another West Coaster friend, Kate: “I gotta say that the fires in Canada are scary. The fact that millions of people are getting smoked is awful. But there is a little part of me that’s like yeah, well, welcome to the Wild West, bitches.”
This same friend’s 2003 wedding on a mountain just outside of Missoula was nearly canceled/relocated last minute because a fire had started from lightning the night before a mere half mile away from where the wedding would take place. The wedding was allowed to proceed. But not before authorities wouldn’t let Alli up the mountain for a period of time (mind you: we bridesmaids were already up there decorating watching the small column of smoke grow to a bigger column of smoke). And also not before a couple of truckloads of smokejumpers barreled up the mountain as guests arrived (guests who were instructed to position their cars facing downhill lest a quick evacuation was required). During the ceremony, vows were punctuated by the hums of planes dumping fire retardant on the blaze. The whole time the fire was controlled and the wedding celebration went on through the night—and was a party for the record books made ever more exciting by the fire nearby. The next morning, the whole region was under a deep cloud of haze and the front page of The Missoulian featured a photo of Alli and her dad walking toward the ceremony in front of the billowing smoke where the fire originated.
I visited Alli on my way to another Montana wedding a few weeks later and by that time, there were multiple fires raging in the region and Western Montana was under a persistent cloud of smoke. I remember how eerie it felt looking directly at the orange sun and seeing a light dusting of ash on my car. This wasn’t a normal site even for someone who grew up in the West. I only remembered one really smoky fall growing up a few hours away in Spokane, in Eastern Washington. These smoke season events happened less frequently, so this still felt like an anomaly.
At the time of those 2003 fires, climate change was not really on my mind. “Global warming” was being talked about more, but I didn’t put the two together in my 22-year-old brain. Fire was normal in the West. But it didn’t occur to me that 20 years later how bad it would get. And with the apocalyptic smoky air making its way from Canada to the East Coast, it feels like finally the rest of the country is seeing what West Coasters have come to know as the norm in the last decade. Certainly, this is very early in the fire season to have this scale of smoke, but it feels all too familiar.
For me, it took experiencing a historic fire nearby in my beloved Columbia River Gorge in 2017 a year after moving back to the region from the East Coast and a week of 500+ AQI air after another historic fire in 2020 for it to really set in that this is our state of being. But before that smoke week in 2020, California had already come to experience annual extended smoke seasons. Just the week before the historic wildfires in Oregon, the other friend in our text group, Kate, who lived in San Francisco at the time (and now lives in Spokane), sent me and Alli apocalyptic images of San Francisco shrouded in an orange haze. I didn’t know that we in the Pacific Northwest were just days away from that ourselves. It was almost easy to distance ourselves from the horror.
By the time the smoke rolled in, I was texting Kate for advice. Because this was a seasonal event for Californians, Kate’s family was well-equipped with air purifiers for every room. We were too late to procure ours for that awful air which felt scarier each day as the air quality notched up higher and higher–100 AQI, 150 AQI, 200 AQI, 300 AQI–it felt like it couldn’t continue to get worse. We were already in the purple “hazardous” place on the AQI scale. By this point, Oregonians had been troubleshooting their way into protection. We were in the middle of a pandemic, so we all were well-equipped with face masks. We were looking for any cracks that smoke might get into and putting towels or tape over those entry points. We were all stocking up on furnace filters and strapping them to box fans to act as a makeshift air purifiers. Those jerry-rigged purifiers were a constant reminder of the toxic air—within a few hours they’d be coated in black particles. Then the AQI continued to rise into the deep maroon reaching up to over 500, literally off the charts. I didn’t even know that this was possible unless you were at the origin of the smoke.
The truth is, I don’t know if 250 AQI looks much different from 500 AQI. Both mean there’s a lot of freaking smoke in the air. But that week+ of smoke shifted something. Those of us who can afford it now have multiple air purifiers at the ready. Oregon’s OSHA adopted permanent rules protecting employees from wildfire smoke. Other policies are being worked on to help communities better adapt to climate change both related to smoke and supplying heat pumps and A/C thanks to the climate change-induced heat dome a year after the smoke.
We’re nearly three years out from what I now call “Smoke Week 2020” and I’ve been revisiting that week a lot in the last few months as I work on this project. But what gets me most every time I write about it is that now I know it’s not an anomaly. My personal experience with this type of climate disaster brings a level of gravity to a situation that’s hard to shake. I imagine that’s what’s happening to a lot of people in New York right now.
That the East Coast is bearing the brunt of the smoke is largely due to wind. Those fires are all the way up in Canada. It’s almost like nature is telling the part of the world that doesn’t have to see or really think about the forests being destroyed: pay attention to me! The world is literally on fire!
Of course, it shouldn’t take personal experience to wake up to the disasters among us. But it does. And a whole lot of people–particularly the most vulnerable who have been impacted by climate disasters the most for a long time already–have been sounding the alarm. Alas, for many of us privileged folks, it takes personal experience to pay attention.
That’s not to say that many of the New Yorkers affected by this aren’t already paying attention. But it does give legislators and politicians who do have the power to affect change in a real-life situation to call upon to argue for increased protections.
In any case, let’s pay attention even when it’s not affecting us personally. Let’s not forget this awful air quality. And let’s see this as a call to take care of one another amidst disaster and then listen to the people who have already been affected.
A note: I focused more on smoke in this story, but I can’t help but call attention to the massive amount of devastation from the fires themselves. The megafire that caused the toxic smoke in 2020 destroyed over 100,000 acres of forest, more than any wildfire in Oregon in recorded history.
It’s true that forest fires are normal and, in fact, are essential to supporting healthy ecosystems. But the megafires of that scale are certainly not normal. They are fueled by climate change and development. Also, more homes and people are being displaced by these fires because of an increase in development into the wildland-urban interface. When I think of the apocalypse of the smoke, I also can’t help but think of the people who had to evacuate within minutes because of the fast-moving fires whipping at their heels. That is another part of an apocalypse that I can’t help but think about and we should all remember as we try to protect ourselves from the smoke.
This was excellent, Elizabeth!