These Wildfires Are a 2020 Redux
Yes, but.
Someone said on a group call tonight that he wasn’t falling prey to the news media hysteria of worry over these fires. Perspective, he said, from the fact that he’s been camping around fires his whole life and the air quality is no worse than that.
Yes, but.
You sit around a campfire occasionally, maybe weekly, for a few hours. Its updraft sucks in air from the bottom and the smoke carries directly skyward away from you. If the wind moves it, and it blows in your direction, you cover your eyes, you cough it out, you change seats, problem solved.
This is a fire that has been burning thousands of acres for weeks on end, continuously, all of its smoke rising into the atmosphere so heavily and in such concentrations it is visible from space. That smoke has traveled, is traveling, hundreds of miles south from Ontario and Quebec, and in that movement has lost to gravity and precipitation all but the lightest and smallest of its particulate matter. When it settles on the northeast US, it nearly blocks out the sun in midday and fills the air with a faintly acrid scent. But you don’t cough, not right away, no. The air is more air than smoke, you don’t cough it out. You breathe it in. You breathe material so small it passes through your lungs directly into your bloodstream. You don’t cough right away, but hours and days later, you complain of a headache. Because it’s far too late to cough. It’s in you, and it is doing its damage. Continuously, with every breath, you absorb more and more of it into your body, and new concentrated clouds form inside you.
You don’t cough. Instead, your 2020 “it’s just a flu” is showing. Your willfully ignorant inner anti-masker is showing. It looks good on you, gives a certain vaguely familiar lying orange glow to your skin.
Post-script synchronous finding on Instagram:
