Nows and Forevers

The otherworldly smoke and health threats this week from plumes from Canadian wildfires — and the unreal photos from New York City and Hudson Valley, among other places — make it difficult for me to reconcile the places I used to live with the Mars-like skies of now.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to have asthma, COPD or another health condition and trying to just get by this week.

Where I live now has a lot of industrial pollution and all-too-frequent health alerts due to temperature inversions that trap pollutants near the surface. But even with all of that, I could tell that we, too, were affected by the smoke plumes. I could see the abnormal haze and the diffracted sunlight as I walked in a local park. I also monitor my workouts with health apps, and I could tell something was dragging my performance ever-so-slightly. The wheezing and sore throat I felt from spring allergies were worse by the time I ended the workout about 15 minutes earlier than I planned.

And that’s just here, where things aren’t anywhere as impacted as New York and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard.

It recalled my time living in northern Maine, where the winds blew smoke and sometimes ash from wildfires in Quebec back across the border.

One of those times was exactly 25 years ago this week, on June 10, 1997, when I was living in Maine. I’ll never forget the smoky smell that permeated everything, the gradual reduction in the sun, and especially the occasional ash that drifted and fell from the sky like a light snow.

It was like standing too close to a bonfire but without the intense heat, I wrote in my journal.

I was new to living in Maine then. I had moved there the year before, first to a town next to the University of Maine, and then in the North Maine Woods closer to the town where I worked for the local weekly newspaper as a reporter. Being so close to a wildfire was a novel experience. I had lived in California for several years but never close enough to that level of fire.

But even then, I knew that what I was seeing, as novel as it was to me (and to many of the people I worked with, who had been there their entire lives), it could be much worse. Our neighbors to the north, in Aroostook County, got a much more apocalyptic taste: Smoke so thick that it brought visibility down to between a half-mile and three miles in the northern and central part of Aroostook County, closer to Quebec and closer to the fires. The Bangor Daily News described the sunrise as “a pale orange dandelion puff, and the haze in the air carried a smell like a summer campfire.”

That sounds a lot like what it was in New York and elsewhere around the Eastern Seaboard this week. Let’s hope it leaves quickly.