When Oregon Skies Rain Ash
Yesterday’s high temperature was supposed to reach 96° (36° C) in Portland. At around three I went for a walk in what my weather app told me was fog. It was 80°, and didn’t get any hotter. There was no fog, of course; it was smoke. A dense, choking blanket thick enough to seep through cracks and fissures in our house so that it smelled as if on fire. It was a substance thick enough to spark an early dusk and keep temperatures fifteen degrees below their predicted peak. And Portland wasn’t even in the center of things.
Two weeks ago, we were exhaling in relief. The fire season had been a light one following a wet spring and mild summer. Yet a two-week hot snap arrived at the end of the month and dried everything out. Then winds started on Labor Day, strong enough to blow down trees and leave Portland littered with branches and debris. The gales hit the scattered, largely contained fires like a great bellows and turned them into an inferno that has burned two thousand homes, displaced half a million* people, and turned the skies into the eerie pallor of nightmares.
As 2020 goes, this seems about right. It is yet another in a series of visitations over which we have no control. We can see their danger, their malignancy, and in some cases even their solution, yet we are helpless to stop them. The year started out with a global pandemic that has to date killed about 200,000 Americans. That’s 22% of the deaths, in a world in which we account for just 4% of the population. Other countries managed to address the pandemic; we just got used to its ravages.
In the spring our deeply disturbing, 400-year habit of oppressing and killing Black people sparked a national reckoning, but instead of healing and solutions, Portland got unmarked federal vans with unidentified goons scooping up citizens. As additional salt for our wounds, caravans of outsiders have driven into our city to taunt and harm those marching for racial justice. We have a president who routinely lies about our city, our leadership, and our protesters, using it as a prop in his racist campaign to scare elderly white people.
And now we have fires tearing through our ancient forests. For those who have not had the pleasure, let me tell you about those emerald treasures. They contain some of the world’s tallest trees, and the tips of the firs, cedars, and spruce stretch up hundreds of feet. The boles of these giants may be fifteen feet in diameter. Much of the forestland is doused by rainfall that keeps the ground damp and springy even in midsummer. As a child of the east side of the Cascades, I was astonished to see the fecundity of Western Oregon forests. Moss grows thick in the crooks of tree branches, and it’s common to encounter ferns growing from them—plants growing on plants growing on plants. I’ve always believed JRR Tolkien must have visited the Pacific Northwest before writing about the Fangorn.
People move to Oregon for complex reasons, but those forests are almost always part of the mix. They are healing, sacred places. People in the Northwest are famously reticent to visit their local churches, but this belies the fact that they spend much of their time praying in cathedrals of trees. Last week Sally and I visited a sapphire pond in the Mount Hood forest that seemed an apt metaphor for the purity we experience in our woodlands. Fed by an underground artesian well, it is a perfectly-clear 45 feet of azure surrounded by an aromatic forest of deep green. We live here because we love these places. At some level, we need them. It is difficult to describe my horror seeing them burn.
2020 has been an exercise in loss. We’ve lost our regular lives, lost the ability to touch one another, to make physical connections. We’ve lost our watering holes, the cheek-to-cheek, sweaty, loud pleasure of packing into a pub on a Friday night. We’ve lost our schools and universities. We lost sports. Many of us lost jobs; some lost businesses. Now people are losing their homes. In Portland, it feels like we’ve lost our right to tell the world how we feel. And now we are losing our forests and seeing our friends and neighbors scatter from their endangered homes.
It’s exhausting. I get up in the morning and try to go about a normal day despite a low-grade depression that has kept me both exhausted and restless for months. And now the skies rain ash.
I know things will change; I even know—rationally, if not emotionally—that we’ll feel better at some future point. But right now it feels unendurable. I am just so tired of it all.
Be well you lovely people, wherever you are. Do try to endure. We’ll get through it somehow—surely together.
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*Oregon’s governor contextualized this much-reported fact yesterday. Half a million are under evacuation warnings; perhaps 80,000 have had to leave their homes.