The Last Word On Nothing

As I write this, the air quality in New York City has taken a turn for the worst. Readings are in the 300s and the sky is that sickly orange. The smoke is the leading story on both the New York Times and the Washington Post homepages. On the Times’ site, there are blow-by-blow updates every few minutes detailing what people on the ground are doing, and approaching the story from every angle, from what to do for your pets to which events are being canceled. 

Among those is a short dispatch from the Times editor Kevin Yamamura called “What Californians want New Yorkers to know about AQI.” Yamamura details what he’s learned in his years dealing with Sacramento’s wildfire smoke. He keeps it practical: cancel outdoor activities, check sites like PurpleAir for AQI readings. “Wildfire smoke has changed our way of life in California each summer and fall,” he writes. “Forget hours or even days of smoke. We have lived through weeks and months of hazy air, stretches where you forget what blue skies even look like.” Nothing but facts here. But as I read I couldn’t help but squint: is that just the tiniest bit of snark I detect? 

As the day went on, I heard from other folks on the west coast who were far less subtle with their snark. Friends vented their frustrations about acquaintances’ Instagram posts about running in smoky weather, friends who were surprised to learn that “smoke season” is a thing in the western U.S., family who didn’t even know about the Canadian wildfires causing the smoke they were experiencing. The difference on this coast, said one friend, is that the smoke comes from nearby fires that are also killing people and burning down towns. People in the Seattle subreddit posted memes poking fun at the other coast: “You merely adopted the smoke,” read one, the text overlaying a photo of Bane from Batman. “I was born in it, molded by it.” The comments ranged from schadenfreude-y to just mean. “Maybe now they’ll take us seriously,” one person wrote. “What are they even complaining about?” wrote another.

Today, the Terrible Online Discourse has moved on to whether west coasters are wrongly accusing New Yorkers of not caring about west coast smoke events, whether the New York Times has sufficiently covered previous western fire events (and whether they have a duty to), and what it means that local politicians are calling the smoke “unprecedented.” I will not weigh in on any of that. But I do think it’s worth considering a question at the root of this all: why have so many westerners had the same reaction to east coast smoke? Feelings are not facts, but they give us information. 

A major theme among the snarkiness: westerners feel ignored. Many feel hurt that family and friends on the east coast didn’t check up on them during previous smoke events, and are annoyed that they didn’t seem to care until the smoke directly affected them. Others say they were explicitly belittled for complaining about previous smoke, or their concerns were minimized. Again, feelings are not facts — though I will say I did see at least one tweet in all this mocking “Cali crybabies.”  

I think what us west coasters want is for our suffering to mean something. Maybe that something is street cred, a sense of toughness. We want to think that we’ve been steeled by our inability to breathe for weeks on end, and the existential dread that comes with it. Perhaps all our practice with smoke means we will be more equipped to deal the next time it comes around, and the more we flaunt that, the more we believe it. The easterners, we say, are sweet summer children, and now they’re finally tasting a bit of the bitter medicine we swallow every summer. 

Or maybe the something is practical; we want to know that people were paying attention and taking precautions for themselves, so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes we did. And yet, east coast public health officials dropped the ball on issuing timely warnings, and I’m still seeing my friends running outside in dangerous air. It’s frustrating to feel like no one was listening. 

For me? My snark is a defense mechanism, because it’s easy to poke fun or act superior than it is to grapple with the deep helplessness I feel when I can barely make out the Empire State Building amidst orange haze. The snark is something you can control; dread is not. I knew that what’s been happening here for years was a harbinger of what was eventually going to happen everywhere, but I didn’t want to believe it would happen this soon. I have joked (“joked”!) about The Water Wars for years and that, too, is coming at us faster than I’d like. 

In our better moments, I think we can all agree: this is bad! And from that agreement arises a common understanding that climate change is coming for all of us. I do not have the answers but I do have hope that each of us can find ways to use less and leverage our personal and communal resources for political change. 

In the meantime, East Coasters have to get through this. And for that, I’d like to offer a bit of unsolicited advice. All of the tips I’ve seen so far address practical matters, like wearing N-95s, washing smoky clothes, creating box fan filters. This is all good and important; you need to protect yourself physically. But be prepared for this smoke to take a real emotional toll on you, too, especially if this lasts a few days. That 2020 heat-and-smoke event was rock bottom for me; because of COVID, we couldn’t be inside together, and the smoke made being outside impossible as well. During those 10 days I camped out in my basement, the only place in my house it was cool enough to even pretend to work, and I binge-watched two seasons of Selling Sunset. Then I cut all my hair off.

All of that is to say: Do not be surprised when the feelings sneak up on you. Climate grief is real. I’ve found I have a lot of trouble working on hazy days. Like, what is the point of <gestures at computer> any of this when the world is burning? Talk to your people, and carve out time to do things you find meaningful and restorative. And once the smoke lifts, don’t be surprised when it comes back — we are all in this for the long run. That goes for all of us. I dread the day the smoke returns to Seattle, as it inevitably will.