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.)
Very thoughtful. I moved from Boston to Walla Walla WA in 2016, and even our first summer here we had to buy N95 masks because the smoke and the PM2.5 particulates were so horrible for many days that summer (and every summer since). Many locals take it more in stride (or just ignore the readings and don’t wear masks…). When they talk about how many acres are burned, people forget it’s cumulative – i.e., X-hundreds of acres burned this year — but that’s on top of last year’s burn, and the year before, etc.
Re-read your piece. Pay attention to how much driving it talks about. 1000 miles to Park City alone. Consider the connection between driving effects on global warming. It is time for us fortunate and more entitled humans to experience more luxurious deprivation. And, to stop considering only themselves as our planet burns – imagine how it is for the non-humans suffering and dying in agony.
Mary Sojourner, it does not say what kind of vehicle they drove, which would make a difference. I get your point, but it is presumptuous.
In our bucolic valley just down the hill from Lake Tahoe, we watch the mountains to the east and south burn every year. This year, we watched the flames engulf our mountains again, only this time, evacuations were called every time and created an anxiety that hung all around us even as the smoke cast a wintry pall over us for months. Heat rose into the 100s this year for the first time since I moved here ten years ago. The Tamarack Fire, which almost destroyed Markleeville and other towns in its 15-mile trek across the ranges, didn’t need to happen at all. It was ignored … “monitored” is the word US Forestry officials used. Their reason was that the terrain was too rough to send crews in safely, yet a video they made while circling in a helicopter over a grove of trees in full flame showed that another helicopter with a bucket of water, maybe two passes, could’ve drenched the fire. Negligence. After two weeks, high winds flared up that flaming grove into the conflagration that destroyed nearly 70K acres of habitat and two dozen buildings. Ash devils sweep the charred landscape into a storm of choking debris. While no one lost their lives, five homes were consumed and the future of those people is thrown into chaos. One family not only lost a home they were about to close on, but they also lost their trailer. They were lucky to find friends to take them in, but now what? We who only suffer from the smoke can tie a silk cowboy bandana around our faces to keep out the particulate. I’ve tested it in previous smoky summers and found it more than adequate, just like the buckaroos have learned. We are merely inconvenienced while so many are now destitute. And the animals wander in confusion, searching for water and food. All because of the feckless inaction of our government officials. Blame climate change if you will. For me, it is a tired mantra and an immoral excuse to cover up a multitude of sins.
Thank you for this Jane. We have been let to believe by fossil fuel companies, big agricultural companies, and their allies that we as individuals are responsible for global warming and that we can reverse it by making different consumer choices. Thus our grief becomes compounded by guilt and a feeling of hopelessness. This is a feature, not a bug. It will need concerted government action. It’s unclear that our political systems are capable of doing what is needed. We need a spiritual revolution.