It’s hard to think straight when the sky has brain fog
I’m not sure why I’m writing this, other than to process some weird feelings I’ve been having since the smoke rolled into my corner of the woods. It’s wildfire season in BC/Canada, which has turned one of my favourite seasons (summer) and one of my favourite summer phenomena (thunder and lightning) into things to be nervous about. Gah! The skies are clearer as I write this, but last week, yeesh, it was feeling downright apocalyptic. I’ve not seen Blade Runner, but I hear it was visually pretty similar! Fun!
What I find interesting is that despite there being no active fires in my area (there was one last week that was quickly snuffed out – phew), I’m still on edge. When the smoke gets thick enough to taste and discolour the sky, things feel eerie, grim. Even the wildlife knows it: birds are less chatty, there’s a strange silence to the air. The sun casts an orange glow, and worse still, an occasional flake of ash rains down. Another reminder that things are burning, somewhere.
And I know I should just put my head down, focus on my laptop, get to work and try to block out the orange haze outside and the fact that I can’t see the mountains that are normally present in the distance. But it’s hard. All I can think of is what all this smoke and ash means.
Somewhere, things are burning. Homes gone, forests razed. Smelling the ashy, weird air brings me back to the several fire seasons we’ve had in BC since I moved here. I can recall at least three! Let’s take a weird, uncomfy trip down memory lane, I guess? I had to dig into my blog archives to remember some of these fire seasons…
Fire season, 2018
In 2018, Jan and I worked on a project that took us to the Fraser Canyon, an area that is currently on fire and where a lot of the smoke in the air is coming from. That year, the fires were elsewhere, but smoke seeped in, blanketing the hillsides in a weird fog that was at times both beautiful and sinister. It’s been very strange to wonder if the places we filmed then will be able to withstand the fires now.
The Fraser Canyon is a beautiful place, full of raw, prehistoric beauty. At times, the river that runs through it is narrow, deep and fast-flowing. At other times, it’s wide, shallow, expansive. It’s a mix of desert environments and dry pine forests. During that trip, Jan and I discovered an entire section of the river that looked like another planet, with dunes several feet high. At another section, we stumbled upon locals fishing for salmon in the haze of wildfire smoke.
Fire season, 2021
I forgot about the 2021 fires, which is wild because that was the year we had a heat dome, fire, and then epic floods that tore apart all the highways connecting BC’s interior with the coast. It was a truly spectacularly awful year in terms of unprecedented weather events. Oh yes, and who can forget the pandemic? I got COVID that year! Delta variant, say whuuuuut. >.< Talk about apocalyptic!
Fire season, 2023
In 2023, fires hit too close to home and burned down entire communities across the lake from where I live. Two close friends of ours lost their homes. (In a truly you-can’t-make-this-shit-up moment, one of these friends was the father-in-law of one of my best girl friends, who also lost her home in the 2003 wildfire.)
The fire then jumped the lake, and another friend was evacuated, fire brushing up against her doorstep. We thought it might jump further. The skies were full of ash, and the air quality in the days that followed broke records for how bad it was. I started packing and filling water jugs – uncertain whether or not I’d need to leave or shelter in place. Limbo is a weird place to be.
Fire season, 2026
I have a pile of work to do: audio podcasts to edit, articles to publish, websites to tweak, LinkedIn posts to write, camping plans to coordinate. One of my old-lady chickens died last week too, and I have to figure out what to do with her (throwing her in the garbage feels so crass).
But…this smoke. These fires. Wondering what’s still standing. Wondering how they’ll spread. I found out today that one of my favourite towns in BC – Kimberley – is on evacuation alert due to two wildfires burning nearby. The entire town. One of my girlfriends lives there, and she took the alert to heart, packed up her stuff, and left for safer ground. I’m nervous for her, her place, her town.
The limbo is really hard to live with. Each time these fires hit, I wonder: Is this our new normal? How are we supposed to get used to living with existential dread all the time? How do you adapt to these feelings? Is it possible? Should we?
How do you work through all this when it is literally too hot and smoky to ignore?
More questions than answers in this post. 💨
