This morning, a long red shadow stretched over my desk. The sun rose with the unsettling neon color of an orange highlighter; the shifty outdoor air, with its brownish-blue tint, subtly promising another day of toxic air, of sour smoke.
Like much of fire-ravaged Northern California, my hometown is engulfed in a smoggy haze. A week since the fires broke out, our air is not getting better. In fact, it has gotten worse. AirNow.gov, a website that charts air quality throughout every state, has designated huge swaths of California as having an Air Quality index of 193 — the top range of the “unhealthy zone” and only a few points away from the 200-point “very unhealthy zone” — the level where “everyone may experience more serious health effects.” The wildfires are polluting air more than 100 miles away.
Despite the official warnings, it as taken a while to fully digest how bad the smoke really is. After all, in the Bay Area, we are technically safe, and the more direct fallout of the recent fires has been horrifying — the death toll has reached 63 and will only swell. In view of that trauma, focusing on the creeping smoke dozens of miles downwind can feel oddly self-centering. But this smoke is affecting us.
I’ve kept hoping the fumes will just blow out to sea. Last year, as the Sonoma fires raged, we in the Bay Area had three truly awful days with awful air. They were rattling. We grieved. And like that process, the smoke moved on. Yet this year the fires are worse and the smoke is hanging over us, unmoving, on eerie, windless days.
So, we wait, our lives cloistered, partially on pause. Each morning, I check the AirNow website. Each day the advice is the same: Stay inside, avoid exertion. We mostly do. The glaucous haze hangs over the three-block walk to my son’s school, and we take that walk but otherwise huddle inside by air purifiers, using a car to do even simple, nearby errands.
Gardening, biking, hiking, playing or eating outdoors, the things that normally make California ideal, are now weirdly inaccessible: a walk to the farmer’s market for local fruit can turn into a hacking cough. Parks are empty, the bike path my husband uses to commute to work is deserted. My friends post pictures of heading out in their various air masks, though it seems the most effective ones are sold out.
We’re all honestly getting a little stir crazy, and some of us ignore the dire daily warnings to stay inside. Yesterday, frustrated to the point of tears, I ended up taking a bike ride (my first exercise outside for days.) On the deserted streets, I saw a few intrepid chickadees, a couple in gas masks walking their dog. People scurried children out of cars and back indoors. One brave man did tai chi alone outside a public library, his solitude itself strangely ominous.
I felt better to have seen the world, but came home with a sore throat and a raging headache. I woke to a low rattle in my lungs.
It goes for all of us, young or old, sick or well. My kids haven’t had outdoor recess in over a week. My son’s school has a chalky, cooped-up smell, and at my daughter’s preschool the kids look a bit glassy-eyed. Both have had class days canceled. So we’ve begun to borrow the tools of Midwest winter — taking them to walk around malls, playing Twister, hosting indoor dance parties.
I know it could be worse: My daughter, age 3, actually had respiratory distress early on and has been left with a ragged hacking cough. We got her checked — and thankfully it is not pneumonia — but the doctors told us that the E.R. is full of kids in trauma, that they are seeing the physiological weaknesses in people inflamed. This is the insidious wider fallout, I realized, just beyond the burnt-out zone.
As we wait, people fortunate enough to afford it are taking all kinds of measures — driving three hours to spend one day outdoors, buying day passes to gyms, stronger filtration systems for their homes and even last-minute plane tickets — to anywhere else. Last night, I woke coughing, opened my laptop and pored over the map of California only to see 300 miles in each direction blanketed in some measure of smoke.
On Veterans Day, we drove our kids to the California Academy of Sciences. The city and the bay were barely visible from the freeway. At the door, museum ticket takers wore green air masks. Inside, families like us breathed purified air while moving from exhibit to exhibit, observing pristine coral reefs behind glass or endangered penguins being fed in tanks. We paused, huddled with other families, inhaling and exhaling the damp cool air of the fog room, which imitates the lung-like qualities of a healthy redwood forest.
Transported from the miniature dystopia, we received some transient reprieve.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking: Is this the new normal? Is this what climate change means for us? Huddling in museums for air, observing exhibits of the undamaged world? The five-day forecast for the Bay Area promises five more days just like this. Perhaps there’s a rainstorm coming just after Thanksgiving, but that’s a week away. In the meantime, we’re at the mercy of stalling winds.
We’ve been told for a generation to expect this kind of creeping devastation. Still, it is incredibly troubling to feel it arriving, to hunker in its shadow. People around me are weighing that too, sobered, feeling their eyes burn, hearing the rattling in their lungs.
Tess Taylor, @Tessathon, is a poet and author, based in the Bay Area. Her book of poems “Work & Days” was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by The Times. Her book of poems “Rift Zone” is forthcoming.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Not Burned, but Suffocated
Opinion | Not Burned, but Suffocated
This morning, a long red shadow stretched over my desk. The sun rose with the unsettling neon color of an orange highlighter; the shifty outdoor air, with its brownish-blue tint, subtly promising another day of toxic air, of sour smoke.
Like much of fire-ravaged Northern California, my hometown is engulfed in a smoggy haze. A week since the fires broke out, our air is not getting better. In fact, it has gotten worse. AirNow.gov, a website that charts air quality throughout every state, has designated huge swaths of California as having an Air Quality index of 193 — the top range of the “unhealthy zone” and only a few points away from the 200-point “very unhealthy zone” — the level where “everyone may experience more serious health effects.” The wildfires are polluting air more than 100 miles away.
Despite the official warnings, it as taken a while to fully digest how bad the smoke really is. After all, in the Bay Area, we are technically safe, and the more direct fallout of the recent fires has been horrifying — the death toll has reached 63 and will only swell. In view of that trauma, focusing on the creeping smoke dozens of miles downwind can feel oddly self-centering. But this smoke is affecting us.
I’ve kept hoping the fumes will just blow out to sea. Last year, as the Sonoma fires raged, we in the Bay Area had three truly awful days with awful air. They were rattling. We grieved. And like that process, the smoke moved on. Yet this year the fires are worse and the smoke is hanging over us, unmoving, on eerie, windless days.
So, we wait, our lives cloistered, partially on pause. Each morning, I check the AirNow website. Each day the advice is the same: Stay inside, avoid exertion. We mostly do. The glaucous haze hangs over the three-block walk to my son’s school, and we take that walk but otherwise huddle inside by air purifiers, using a car to do even simple, nearby errands.
Gardening, biking, hiking, playing or eating outdoors, the things that normally make California ideal, are now weirdly inaccessible: a walk to the farmer’s market for local fruit can turn into a hacking cough. Parks are empty, the bike path my husband uses to commute to work is deserted. My friends post pictures of heading out in their various air masks, though it seems the most effective ones are sold out.
We’re all honestly getting a little stir crazy, and some of us ignore the dire daily warnings to stay inside. Yesterday, frustrated to the point of tears, I ended up taking a bike ride (my first exercise outside for days.) On the deserted streets, I saw a few intrepid chickadees, a couple in gas masks walking their dog. People scurried children out of cars and back indoors. One brave man did tai chi alone outside a public library, his solitude itself strangely ominous.
I felt better to have seen the world, but came home with a sore throat and a raging headache. I woke to a low rattle in my lungs.
It goes for all of us, young or old, sick or well. My kids haven’t had outdoor recess in over a week. My son’s school has a chalky, cooped-up smell, and at my daughter’s preschool the kids look a bit glassy-eyed. Both have had class days canceled. So we’ve begun to borrow the tools of Midwest winter — taking them to walk around malls, playing Twister, hosting indoor dance parties.
I know it could be worse: My daughter, age 3, actually had respiratory distress early on and has been left with a ragged hacking cough. We got her checked — and thankfully it is not pneumonia — but the doctors told us that the E.R. is full of kids in trauma, that they are seeing the physiological weaknesses in people inflamed. This is the insidious wider fallout, I realized, just beyond the burnt-out zone.
As we wait, people fortunate enough to afford it are taking all kinds of measures — driving three hours to spend one day outdoors, buying day passes to gyms, stronger filtration systems for their homes and even last-minute plane tickets — to anywhere else. Last night, I woke coughing, opened my laptop and pored over the map of California only to see 300 miles in each direction blanketed in some measure of smoke.
On Veterans Day, we drove our kids to the California Academy of Sciences. The city and the bay were barely visible from the freeway. At the door, museum ticket takers wore green air masks. Inside, families like us breathed purified air while moving from exhibit to exhibit, observing pristine coral reefs behind glass or endangered penguins being fed in tanks. We paused, huddled with other families, inhaling and exhaling the damp cool air of the fog room, which imitates the lung-like qualities of a healthy redwood forest.
Transported from the miniature dystopia, we received some transient reprieve.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking: Is this the new normal? Is this what climate change means for us? Huddling in museums for air, observing exhibits of the undamaged world? The five-day forecast for the Bay Area promises five more days just like this. Perhaps there’s a rainstorm coming just after Thanksgiving, but that’s a week away. In the meantime, we’re at the mercy of stalling winds.
We’ve been told for a generation to expect this kind of creeping devastation. Still, it is incredibly troubling to feel it arriving, to hunker in its shadow. People around me are weighing that too, sobered, feeling their eyes burn, hearing the rattling in their lungs.
Tess Taylor, @Tessathon, is a poet and author, based in the Bay Area. Her book of poems “Work & Days” was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by The Times. Her book of poems “Rift Zone” is forthcoming.
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