I recently stumbled upon a TikTok of a panicked woman in her fancy New York apartment:
“I had to cram this towel under the door so the smoke doesn’t get in! I’ve got a fan going. I’ve got my air purifier running on max and I had to order another off Amazon but I don’t even know when it’s going to come. Look at it outside! You can’t even see anything!”
The camera pans across her living room. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, New York’s skyline looks just as white and soulless as her apartment.
Standing in my outdated kitchen in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, I kept scrolling through doomsday footage, unable to keep myself from laughing.
Just wait until you’ve got burnt pine needles raining on your patio, bitch.
I had to stop myself from writing the thought as a comment, but I felt my response in my bones.
I’ve lived my fair share of summers that look like Stephen King’s The Mist. I’ve got two decades of wildfire smoke experience. I’ve stared down that white nothingness and imagined things coming out of it. I’ve taken pictures of the haze, and shared my photos, hoping that people elsewhere would see and understand what it was like to literally breathe the Mexico movie filter.
Sometimes the photos pop up in my Facebook memories and I chuckle to myself, possessing the ability to throw some dark humour over moments that I don’t remember fondly.
2003
I was 16. On July 30th, A guy threw a cigarette butt onto the brush on his property, which ignited a terrible fire to burn in the North Thompson Valley. Smoke quickly spread, casting a white haze over surrounding areas.
Living in a city is beneficial in that the only thing I really dealt with was smoke. At one point it knocked out the internet so I couldn’t use MSN. My sister and I played video games late into the smoggy evening, the windows open. We didn’t have air conditioning. The cold smoky air didn’t seem so bad overnight.
Campfire smell. Wildfire smell. It felt like the same thing, really.
For a while, the hazy skies felt like a weird novelty. When the internet was fixed, I’d chat with friends on MSN messenger about the smell, the haze, and how it felt like it was the fucking apocalypse.
This is such a weird summer, I’d write, dread building as the smoke thickened with each passing day.
I recalled walking through the sepia-toned streets with friends, the summer nostalgia saturated with yellow. No filter required. It was already built in.
A friend of mine was evacuated from her house. I worried about her, imagining her sleeping on a cot at the local arena. Fortunately, she had family in town to stay with, but then a more paranoid predicament flitted through my head: What if the fire burns her house down? What if the fire makes its way into the city?
My dad assured me it wouldn’t happen. An avid fan of planes, he stood outside every day, squinting through the haze, naming all the water bombers and helicopters that flew by, gathering water from the nearby lakes. It was weird that he seemed more excited about the aircraft and that he wasn’t dreading the future like I was.
Maybe it was just an adult thing, the ability to remain calm when things seemed all wrong. My dad is a Boomer, after all.
2017
Summers after 2003 sometimes carried the smell of smoke. The haze fell over the city like a dream. “Remember the smoky summer?” we’d all ask each other.
The smell of smoke often triggered some positive memories of the time. I recalled walking through the sepia-toned streets with friends, the summer nostalgia saturated with yellow. No filter required. It was already built in.
In 2005, I graduated. I went to college in 2006. I found a boyfriend and moved out of the house in 2007. I moved in with him in 2008. Every summer sparked memories. Smoke. Not a lot. Just a little for memory’s sake. Sometimes, on road trips, we’d drive through the blackened dead forest, the reality of the smoke smell setting in.
In 2010, my husband and I married. In 2015, we had a kid.
My daughter was a toddler when the smoke really returned. This time, it wasn’t a novelty. It got thick. It got grey. Days forecasted to be bright and sunny and without a cloud in the sky were yellow and saturated, the sun a giant golden orb in the sky.
2017 was a particularly awful fire season. Once again, the fire affected smaller surrounding communities. More of them had to be evacuated, and many of the evacuees ended up in Kamloops. The city did its best to host them, to distract them, throwing nightly concerts with local musicians as the doomsday orb retreated every night into the murky twilight.
It returned a year later.
“This is going to every summer,” I finally said aloud. We were at my grandfather-in-law’s 80th birthday party in 2018. The family was gathered in his backyard which overlooked a wooded hillside. My daughter and her cousin ran around the trees in their pastel party dresses.
I took pictures, the orange haze melting into the horizon. The smoke muted the colors of the party decor. I accepted every glass of wine that my mother-in-law offered me. Red coursed through my dread as we all played games and sang Happy Birthday over salad and deviled eggs and cake.
I cut into my slice and ate, dread simmering in my veins.
2021
Somewhere during 2020, the stress of life gave me adult acne. At first, I thought it was from the masks, but as the restrictions eased. I wore my mask as little as I could, but the acne kept getting worse, swells of red exploding in masses all over my face.
In the summer of 2021, my husband and I made summer plans for Canada Day weekend to see his family in Princeton. We would visit. We would camp. My mother-in-law even agreed to take the kids for a couple of days so my husband and I could spend some quality time together at Manning Park Resort.
The 2021 heat dome conflicted with our plans. It was too late to cancel our hotel reservations, though, so we forced them to work. The first couple days, my husband and I stayed in a hotel room without air-conditioning. Our couple’s vacation was both brutal but bearable. Each day, we trekked through the hiking trails, finding shady spots of the part to seek relief. Being in nature, it was cooler than the city. We took cover under trees, ankles buried in lakes and rivers, faces buried in books. It was all we could do.
Every so often, I’d glance at my phone, looking at the forecast, the predictions, the news. Wildfires would start. We knew they would..
“The storm is moving away,” I said. “We’re safe. I promise.”
Then the sirens started.
We didn’t end up camping. It was too fucking hot. It’s hard to explain what 46 degrees Celsius feels like, especially in a city full of paved streets and cement buildings and hardly a tree nearby to provide shade. My glasses kept burning my face. Even standing outside for 10 seconds, I couldn’t keep them on. I’d scream, scrambling to pull them off, the arms of the frames burning the tips of my fingers.
When I told my daughter that we wouldn’t be camping, she was upset. I promised that we would do all sorts of fun outdoor things. We’d fill the paddling pool. We’d buy water guns. We’d have as much fun as we could, despite the heat.
We drove back to Kamloops and eventually drove into the smoke of a recently-ignited fire. It stood on the horizon, a giant mushroom cloud that grew as we drove toward it. Home.
It was Canada Day. On account of the heat dome and continuing covid protocols, the city didn’t plan on having fireworks.
That night, a storm brewed. My kids were terrified, and I held them until the deep rumble of thunder faded into the distance. “The storm is moving away,” I said. “We’re safe. I promise.”
Then the sirens started.
Lighting struck a hillside suburb just on the edge of the city. I followed all the live local coverage as the highway was blocked off and firetrucks drove up and into the orange, hoping to put the quickly-spreading fire before it burned structures.
Sirens blared down the highway. It was late. The kids wouldn’t sleep. I kept refreshing Twitter, the dread working through my fingers, taking over. I got up and started gathering documents, photos, hard drives, and valuables. I shoved them hastily into empty luggage.
“You’re acting crazy,” my husband said. “The fire isn’t going to get here.”
“It could. Even if it doesn’t, there’s going to be another fire! There’s going to be more! I just want to have a bag ready! I’ll feel better if I have a bag ready!” By then I was sobbing uncontrollably.
I was having a panic attack.
Eventually, the sirens stilled. The night calmed.
I didn’t sleep well.
Above: Overheated ravens in Manning Park during the 2021 heat dome.
For the rest of the summer, we did our best to cope with the rest of the heat dome. We fired up the portable air conditioners, grateful to have two that we moved around the house from day to night. (At the time, air-conditioners were sold out in every story and being auctioned off on Facebook Marketplace for upwards of $600 CDN). I covered all the windows with sheets and always kept several trays of ice in the freezer.
Before the smoke got really bad, we went to Toys R Us and bought water guns. We shot at each other in the front yard, but things got eerie when the birds started to gather in the trees. They chirped at us and came close. I fired a stream of water at one, accidentally shooting it right in the face.
The bird didn’t move. The bird just stood there. I fired again and it remained on the branch, all its bird friends gathering. They were hot and thirsty and there was no other water to be found.
After that night, I spent many of my evenings on Twitter in a perpetual doom scroll. Fires were everywhere in the province. I wanted videos. I had to see. Part of me was terrified. Part of me was fascinated, watching travellers venture down the Coquihlla, a highway I’d travelled often. How strange and terrifying to see it be the place where two giant wildfires converged.
One night, when my husband has nothing better to do, and because everyone else was doing it, we watched Bo Burnham’s INSIDE. It was a nice distraction until the campfire sounds at the beginning of “That Funny Feeling” started to crack. A trigger. A sepia memory. Bo cleared his throat, and he started singing his nostalgic campfire song about the dread I’d been facing since 2003.
I fucking sobbed like a baby, and I still can’t listen to it without shedding a tear or two. I can’t sing along to it without my voice cracking, just like the logs in the fire.
I sometimes wrote satirical gothic climate change poetry to cope, but it did little when Twitter was just a tap away, and I’d spent many late nights endlessly scrolling, endlessly refreshing the weather app, and constantly checking YouTube for videos of the chaos. One afternoon, I looked up from my phone and noticed the black needles raining down on my neglected patio.
They were from pine tries, had probably travelled miles to get here. Black needles, smelling of smoke and dead earth.
What if we kissed in the forest fire-scented red twilight, on my charred pine-needle-littered deck? I tweeted.
I laughed.
I had to fucking laugh.
There was no sense in cleaning up the fucking deck. I wasn’t going to be using it for the rest of the summer.
Eventually, the smoke faded. Summer ended. All the fire evacuees eventually returned home, although some of them were now lacking homes. Farms. Jobs. Family.
The rain came and I felt better, but then things got even more fucked, when the rain kept coming and the floods came.
An “atmospheric river” it was called. For the longest time, I loved rain and found comfort in it. Now, come fall, I have a new thread of dread that tugs inside of me.
I recall a particular Saturday night covid church service. My pastor asked everyone how we were doing. A Boomer woman said she felt okay, that she knew God was protecting her.
I chimed in and said that I was paranoid. I often prayed but I also worried a lot about what the future held, not just for me but for my kids. This is going to be every summer for them. What kind of future are my kids going to have?
The Boomer woman nodded and said she hadn’t thought about it that way.
2023
I don’t follow the news much these days. My therapist told me that living in the present is important, especially with kids. I’m grateful to live in a city with a pretty good emergency response. Strata started cutting down trees on the property that could potentially be a hazard.
We had a week of smoke in the early spring. A teaser. A preview.
Oddly enough, when the New York smoke pictures started flooding my timelines, I was shocked to not smell it or see it. This time, it was other people sharing the horror.
“It looks like the end of the world!”
“This is crazy!”
“I can barely breathe.”
“Maybe now people will take this seriously.”
Now, I just shrug and keep scrolling, the dread working through my fingers again. I close the apps. I put my phone down. I need to live in the present and I can’t give my kids any happy memories when I’m staring at that fucking red orb through my phone screen.
I’ll be seeing it in real life soon enough.