Where There's Smoke

When I wake up at dawn the sun is red. The skies are filled with white and gray, almost like the fog we normally see here in Northern California in the summertime. Maybe there is a little fog out there, but when I step out to pick up the papers from the sidewalk, I smell it. You can't smell fog. But the smoke that has drifted over the city, over the entire state for the past five days is evident the minute I take a breath.

The first day it made me nostalgic. The morning air smelled like a beach bonfire, a campfire on its way out, even the embers of a fire crackling in the fireplace. But the novelty wore off quickly as the radio and television news reporters listed all the wildfires burning in different parts of the state, many only partially contained, with new fires starting every day. When the reporters talked about unhealthy air and particulates that can lodge deep within your lungs. We've got draught conditions already this summer, and even though it's only June, the woods and the valleys and the mountains are parched and crispy, ready to go at a hint of heat lightening; humidity hardly exists.

"Smell the smoke?" I ask my sleepy teenagers already set to their new, no-school schedule as they wander toward breakfast. "See the haze," I say as I pour the orange juice. "It's not fog, it's smoke from all the fires burning!" They don't answer, they aren't listening. They aren't old enough yet to feel the guilt I feel about having inflicted so much trash, so much rubbish on the earth. Climate change and global warming, these are things they've learned about in school, and so they dutifully recycle their water bottles and compost their food scraps. But they don't take ownership of the scary, dirty place the world's become. And why should they? For all intents and purposes we're raising our kids right so they will take responsibility for their own garbage, so they will grow up to be ecologically responsible adults.

Each day when another red sun greets me, and the smokey haze obliterates the sunshine, I wonder though. I hope it's not too late.