Summer of Fire
In Washington, the girls and I would dodge rain showers when planning our running adventures.
This summer, in the mountains of Idaho, we're playing the impossible game of dodging wild fire smoke. Some days it feels as if the entire state is on fire.
Yesterday a new fire started in an area of forest two ridges east of us, just ten miles as the crow flies. A campground five miles east of the fire, along Upper Payette Lake, was evacuated. This morning the smoke from this new fire mingled with that from many others in the area - referred to collectively as the East Zone Complex - and hung over the house and forest behind us like a shroud, pale and quietly menacing.
It's like when you stand around a campfire and the breeze keeps blowing the smoke in your face, following you wherever you move.
The smoke makes me sneeze. A lot. It gives me a constant, low level headache. My eyes water from the constant grit. I awaken each morning with crusty eyelids. My nose bleeds when I blow it each morning. I don't even want to contemplate what the smoke does to our lungs when run or hike in the forest.
No matter where we go, it smells like a campfire. At least for we humans, it's a pleasant smell. I often wonder what the girls, and all the forest creatures, think. Does that smell set off internal alarms, a stress or flight response?
As the girls and I went for a brief walk this morning, on a forest road about three miles up into the forest behind the house, my eyes burned and nose tickled. I could tell Maia's eyes were bothered, too - they became weepy, as they do from too much trail dust or pollen. Through breaks in the trees I could see the entire valley floor filled with smoke, like a thin, dirty, heavy winter fog seeping downhill through the trees to clog the natural bowl below.
Both girls were skittish, stopping frequently to intently listen to forest sounds, to scan the near landscape for movement. I'm sure the forest's citizens are on the move, trying to get away from the fire and smoke, forced from their homes and familiar feeding grounds. The girls undoubtedly were picking up on some general sense of unease among the forest creatures. Maia kept telling me, with tail down body language, nudging my hand with her nose, that she wanted to go home. We did.
Maybe she hears the forest creatures crying.
The photos posted with this entry were taken from the house or the forest just above us, looking west over the valley toward the Idaho-Oregon border. They illustrate the striking difference between clear and smoky air. In one, large wild fire smoke columns can be seen; they look like the mushroom clouds of nuclear bomb explosions.
Key, top to bottom: A January 2007 sunrise, clear air, some fog in valley; April 2007, valley with "controlled burn" on far side; July 2006 sunset with huge smoke columns from lightning strike fires that burned across the Snake River on the Oregon side that summer (but note that you can still see far across my valley); sunset on July 23rd of this year showing the general smoky haze that most days settles over the landscape.
One upside: the sunsets are spectacular.