The smoke started
while I was in the air.
I first saw it,
after my plane landed,
as a video on my phone—
a gold and gray billow
just two miles into the mountains
from the green property
where we lived.
“Oh good, you’re home.
You can help protect the house
from the new wildfire,”
my landlord texted, joking,
but only half.
This year, for our anniversary, my husband and I went backpacking. As we left Seattle, the sky was a clear, bright blue, and all the mountains were out: you could see depth in the Olympic range, and Rainier looked stunning as usual, if a little snow-bare. The hike was blissfully shaded and generously graded, the campsites delightfully deserted, the lake deliciously frigid. We were in bed by 8:30 and set an alarm to wake up at 3am to catch the Perseids. It was a perfect day.
As we settled back in the tent after the meteor shower, the winds suddenly shifted. The cool night air grew strangely hot, and carried the strong scent of smoke. Our tent whipped around in the gusts as pine needles rained down on us. I sat up in my sleeping bag to have a look outside: had a wildfire started somewhere near us? We were, after all, getting our second heat wave of the summer, and so much of the western part of the country was already burning. Sensing my panic, my husband suggested we just pack up and head out, and we were back at the car by 7:30am. It turns out there had been two new fires in Seattle that day, but none in the mountains where we’d hiked.
That day, I realized climate change has created a new anxiety for me (as if I needed more anxieties): being trapped in the backcountry during a wildfire. Usually, when I feel anxious about something, I try to make sense of the actual risk involved, and how to mitigate that risk to calm myself down. For instance, after a few unpleasantly close encounters with bears on a previous trip, I developed a bear anxiety, but after some research on bear behavior, brushing up on what to do (or not to do) if a bear appears, and making sure my bear hang game is strong, I feel less worried.
But I have no idea what to do about my fire anxiety. I checked the local fire situation before we left, but with how quickly fires can start and spread, it’s quite possible one could erupt while I’m hiking, especially on multi-day trips. I know that most fires aren’t mega firestorms, but “unprecedented” seems to be the norm now — what can I do if one breaks out where I’m hiking? The only thought my husband and I had in the moment was to get in the freezing lake with our dog, just like 200 hikers in the Sierra did during last year’s Creek Fire. Reading news articles has only made me more anxious; there are so many stories of hikers getting trapped and narrowly surviving, and reveal terrifying details I hadn’t considered, like the fact that synthetic clothing can melt onto your body in high heat.
A couple days after our hike, we set off on a road trip from Seattle to the Colorado Rockies. On the first day, we drove 1,000 miles to Park City, Utah, and our entire drive was clouded with smoke. As we drove through each town, I checked the air quality index, and it was always in the “unhealthy” range — over 150. In some places, visibility was limited to about a quarter mile. When we finally got close to Park City, we learned a wildfire had just broken out in some nearby mountains that afternoon, and was growing quickly. The highway we’d planned to take had temporarily closed as fire crews worked and residents evacuated.
I can’t shake this feeling that the fires and their smoke are following me. Really, they are following all of us. If we’re lucky, it just filters the sun’s light into a disconcerting coral color; if we’re not, we lose our homes, our towns, our loved ones. Summer was once my favorite season. Now, it is the time of year my climate grief reaches its peak as new records are broken again and again. Each time I learn about some awful moment in history, I wonder how people just continued living their lives amidst the chaos, and I realize I am doing that right now. Every day I sit down at my computer and I type emails and look at memes and pet my dog and make dinner. Sometimes I get angry reading the news and I talk about climate change with my friends. I sort the garbage and compost and recycling and wonder if it makes any difference. I vote for people who advocate for more climate friendly policies and more often than not, they let me down. What else is there to do?
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)
This month I left Ottawa for the first time in years. It was marvelous to be somewhere else, doing something else, for once. It was not quite as marvelous to be in transit again.
There’s nothing as boring as travel delay stories, but here’s a flavour of the experience: People were taking photos of the security lineups to show social media how ridiculous they were and the announcements asked us to go and buy water because there wasn’t any on the plane. We couldn’t take off because there wasn’t any ground crew, then we couldn’t deplane because there weren’t any gate agents. Email after email delayed everyone’s flights and rebooked our connections while we were in the air.
By the time I was in Toronto, ready to fly home to Ottawa, the airline had given up on taking me there until the following day. But all of the hotels were full of people doing their quarantine. I’m not talking all of the airport hotels. I mean all of the hotels downtown, around the airport, and everywhere in between.
At 1:30am I had a glimmer of hope when my umpteenth phone call reached a hotel that could not, themselves, take me, but that could book me in at one of their other locations, some distance away. I made the reservation and then stood in line while taxis didn’t come.
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It’s tricky, trying to understand a crisis when you’re in it. How invasive it can feel to read apocalyptic headlines about your home, like having overwrought, uninvited strangers show up to a family funeral. So terrible, so shocking, people say, snapping photos. People are sorry about the wildfires ravaging northern California right now, again, but one sometimes gets the sense that the world is also kind of disappointed in California, too, by how far the golden state that “perfected if not invented the American summer” has let herself go.
A few years back I started keeping a journal that stacks entries one on top of the other, year by year, so that I on any given day I can see what I was doing and thinking about one, two, three years ago. The summer/fall entries are getting repetitive: fire, fire, fire. One friend just lost her hometown, Greenville, to the Dixie Fire, now the second largest wildfire in California history. “We see our pain reflected on the front page of the New York Times,” she wrote. “We see the homes of our loved ones on the nightly news. And yet, there is no help coming.” (Here is one link to help. We also need federal and state governments to ramp up prescribed burns, cultural burning, and thinning to around 2 million acres per year.)
Another friend has spent most of the summer tending firehoses. She recently found herself driving an excavator, flames erupting around her. She describes the vendors who show up at every big fire to hawk T-shirts, their pop-up tents barely visible through the smoke. All the firefighters buy them, like concert goers. Watching a parade of tourists float down the river in yellow rafts and inner tubes under a grimly smoky sky just after the IPCC report comes out, I find myself imagining the rafter as passengers on the Styx, on a deeply discounted Groupon adventure to the underworld. I call my sister, who is similarly cracked, and she suggests that I go swimming, and it reminded me of this post. I’ve been neglecting my swimming routine lately, and it shows. As the wise Cameron Walker knows, it’s time to get back in the water.
The post below first ran in August 2020.
The slow stretch of river where I like to swim gleamed copper yesterday morning, reflecting sunlight tinted red by wildfire smoke. I sat and drank my coffee as the sun rose, watching the silhouette of a hummingbird zip across the dun-colored sky.
Four mergansers cruised across the pond then dove underwater, leaving barely a ripple behind them. “Must be nice to be a boat, a plane, and a submarine,” a friend who’d stopped to watch the ducks said. We chatted for a minute about loss and transition, about the hundreds of too-close-to-home wildfires in California and the triple digit heatwave fueling them. “I came here to swim,” I told him. “That’s how I’m dealing with this.”
The water in the river stays cold all summer, stored in an upstream reservoir. When the weather gets hot, dam operators release more water to generate power for air conditioners. This week, as you’ve probably heard, temperatures vaulted past historic records, and the demand for power threatened to overwhelm the state’s electricity system, prompting rolling blackouts. To keep our energy bill down and preserve my sanity I’ve been attempting to remain in a state of near-hypothermia, starting each day with a cold morning swim.
This morning I stood at the water’s edge for several minutes, debating whether to go all the way in. The water was cold enough to make my foot bones ache, and I dreaded the brain-freeze that would come when I submerged my head.
Then a hot, hair dryer-like wind blew up the canyon. I caught the scent of late-August blackberries, so ripe now they’ll fall apart in your fingers as you pick them, and of evening primroses, a fragrant, pale yellow flower that opens at sunset and closes at dawn. The chorus of birds got louder; I set my stopwatch and dove in.
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You know I love the 17-year cicadas. I loved when the nymphs were crawling out of the ground. I loved when the adults were blundering about. I loved the wings littered on the ground. I loved the singing from the trees. Now I love seeing the flagging on trees, the latest reminder of the cicadas’ presence – the brown-leafed tips of limbs hanging down, showing every twig where a cicada laid her eggs.
But the cicadas have left us one last gift that I could do without, according to various reports in local news outlets. Oak leaf itch mites are tiny critters that live in oak trees. According to at least one cicada expert, these mites might be having a really good year, feasting on cicada eggs. And then they might be falling out of the trees. And then, just for the heck of it, they might be biting humans.
I heard about these weird bites from a friend in northern Virginia first. Then the articles appeared. And then last Thursday I was sitting at my desk and noticed some very itchy bites on my chest, arms, and stomach. That’s odd, I thought – how did a mosquito bite me that many times, inside my apartment, without me noticing it? The next day they were worse, red and inflamed. Unlike mosquito bites, which generally fade if I ignore them, these kept getting worse. By Saturday each had a little blister-y blob in the center.
I reread the Washington Post article about the mites. And I remembered that, Wednesday night after work, I’d been feeling a little sorry for myself and went for a walk, which included sitting for about 10 minutes in the grass. Under an oak tree. An oak tree with cicada flagging.
It’s not always obvious why it’s useful to learn about nature in an urban environment. I live in the city. I get around inside manmade objections, like cars and trains. My food comes from a grocery store. The biggest threats to my life are probably other people. My survival skills are mostly in the fiber arts. I don’t need to build my own shelter or forage my own food.
But, on Sunday, in the National Gallery of Art’s sculpture garden, when a friend and I were looking for a place to picnic, I picked a spot in the shade of a row of linden trees. Lindens. Definitely not oaks. The mosquitoes had their way with me, but I avoided the mites.
Seventeen years from now, I hope there are enough cicadas for another spectacular event. I live in fear that the scientist in Jane’s Biographic article about cicadas is right: “They’re going to be like the passenger pigeons of the insect world” he said. I was so sad when I read that, I stopped reading.
So I look forward, with a little trepidation, to the return of the cicadas in 2038. And I hope that someone will remind me to leave town before the cicadas start hatching and the mites start raining down.
Photo: Helen Fields
Right now, my summer feet are having fun in the beautiful red dirt in the Southwest. This post first ran in August 2019.
At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.
I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?
But so far, I don’t have them. Even though the climate is mild here, I often wear shoes, even boots, in the winter. Even right now, in the dog days of summer, I’m typing this and I still have on the running shoes that I’ve been wearing since biking to school this morning. Hang on—okay, now they’re off. Socks, too. There’s the parquet floor now, smooth and just slightly cool, under my soles.
When I remember, I do try to go barefoot. It does feel relaxing. I do like feeling things like this, the texture of the ground, its temperature. There’s a sidewalk parking strip down the street with smooth, round stones that feels like a free acupressure session. And there’s such relief, on that pathway down to the beach, once my feet finally reach the sand.
But my feet never seem to get tougher. The gravel that runs along the side of the house always presses into my skin like tiny tacks, and I hop and skitter and hiss nasty things at it when I go to put the bikes away. And my feet accumulate all sorts of ugly things—black spots of tar, bee stings, moon-like calluses on the balls and heels.
Once school started, I found my shoes again. It’s too far to walk barefoot to school, and while I love seeing barefoot people riding beach cruisers, the idea of putting skin on metal pedals seems sketchy and uncomfortable. I have to bring out other protective layers, too–sunscreen and full lunchboxes, fresh school supplies and new socks. An encouraging yet increasingly insistent voice that gets homework in backpacks and bodies out the door. The promises that it will really be more fun at school than at home, where I’ll just be boringly typing things on the computer.
Humans have spent most of their existence without shoes. Now a lot of people wear them most of the time. But this means most people don’t have a chance to develop thickened soles; their feet are already cushioned from the earth’s rougher spots. So a group of researchers on several continents decided to look at whether calluses act differently than shoes when it comes to how well feet can sense the ground while walking.
The researchers compared shod participants to those who spend most of their time barefoot. They thought the calluses might reduce how well a foot could sense the ground beneath it, but it turned out that although calluses can provide a layer of protection against thorny patches, calloused feet were just as sensitive as those that spent most of their time in shoes.
I thought it was just more barefoot time that would help me get my summer feet, to feel nothing as I charged across the parking lot to the beach, to whistle as I walked on the gravel. I thought after six years of back-to-school picnics and pencils and pictures that this would feel like more of the same, that they would all run toward the classrooms at the sound of the bell, that I would run away. There would be nothing sharp that could penetrate us, that would make us stop and curl up and cry.
The calluses are there, trying to do their job of protecting me. Still, I’m tender about the end of summer, even with my thicker soles. Maybe they were never meant to stop me from feeling, but instead are making sure that I keep walking, feeling it all.
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Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license
Manhattan rattles my ears. Subway lines shake the fine bones inside my head. Cars honking on the street change the way my brain physically functions. When I stayed in the city a week ago I noticed the same as I always do: noise.
I live in a quiet place off the grid in Western Colorado and when I plunge into urban melee it is a primarily aural experience. Much of the city runs at about 85 decibels, a level that takes just eight continuous hours to permanently kink the hairs transmitting sound through the inner ear. The average subway ride comes to around 112 dB, somewhere between a shouted conversation and a power saw going off near your head.
An audiology researcher in Berkeley, California, informally tested the sound of his local transit system and found sustained peaks at the level of a rock concert (around 120 dB). On top of that, he noted, many passengers were wearing ear buds, listening to music loud enough to mask the external noise, far exceeding limits on volume and time-exposure that lead to permanent damage and hearing loss.
I’ve made a habit of seeking out the quieter places in the city, this time taking shelter in a poetry reading room. At other times I’ve gone to Wall Street at dawn on a Sunday morning for its towering quiet or, once, the Ramble in Central Park at night, also quiet but disturbingly dangerous. Continue reading
Our mother died on August 7, 2010, quite a while ago now. Our father had already died way back in 1978. Last Monday, I noticed the date, thought it was probably their wedding anniversary, and then thought, “Oh, Mom will be sad today.” Then I thought, “No, she’s dead too.” Everybody does this, deaths never quite go away, do they. This first ran on August 17, 2011.
My mother was an old lady, she’d lived a good and useful life, and she died a year and ten days ago. I hadn’t been keeping track of her death’s anniversary but I didn’t need to; I only had to figure out why I was walking around feeling, for no good reason, sad. One of my cousins wrote to me, “I’m sorry you are sad, Annie. Thursday my new couch was delivered. I cried as my old one left – apparently I had an undiscovered attachment to it.” My cousin recently moved to a new house with a new love; the old couch was from her old life, years ago, when her husband had died. Sad in early August? Crying over couches? Really? Science, as it often does, has a nice metaphor: resonance.
When I was a kid, I’d open the piano lid and tap a string and it would hum; and then like magic, all on its own, another string hummed too. I thought the strings were malfunctioning and quit thinking about it. Obviously I was a young English major; a young physicist would have tapped some more strings and then looked it all up and found the strings hummed because they were vibrating, oscillating; and that each string had its own native note, its natural frequency of oscillation, its resonant frequency. And if one string hums at that particular frequency, then as if in sympathy the other hums too.
In fact, everything – atoms, molecules, crystals, desks, skyscrapers — has its own resonant frequency at which, depending on its mass and stiffness, it most wants to oscillate. So resonance is a response; it’s when two things are linked in some way or somehow touching, and then one taps or vibrates or oscillates and the other responds at that same frequency.
If you’re an army crossing a suspension bridge, for instance, you shouldn’t march in cadence in case your cadence happens to match the bridge’s resonant frequency and the bridge jumps in step with you. If you rock a rocking chair too fast or slow, the rocker will just sit there; rock at the resonant frequency and the baby falls asleep. If you pump a swing too fast or slow, nothing much happens; pump at the resonant frequency, it’s almost like flight. If you’re in a building and the earth quakes at the building’s resonant frequency, get out fast.
Resonance is actually more complicated than this. Resonances can be forced or driven, all the way to disaster. Pump the swing harder and harder at that right frequency and you risk breaking your neck. Sing loudly at a wineglass at the right frequency and it’ll shatter. Google a video of the resonating Tacoma Narrows bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie, before it fell into the river. The genius inventor, Nicola Tesla, supposedly said that if he could figure out the resonant frequency of the earth, he could split it to pieces. An aside: don’t google Tesla, who attracts enthusiasts, unless your bullshit detectors are robust, hair-trigger, and highly-informed (though you should read this novel; it’s charming).
But disaster isn’t part of this metaphor. The metaphor is simple resonance — like the sympathetic piano strings, like the resonance you notice when you first meet someone and know you’re going to get along. We use the metaphor all the time: we’re in tune, we’re on the same wavelength, we’re in synch. Death set up a resonance with early August, with a couch; another early August, a different couch, and there like magic is death.
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Photo credits: couch – bartek.langer; swing – John Garghan
