122. Smoke and Covid

The fire news today is about the smoke from the Dixie Fire in California impacting the lives of people in faraway Utah and Colorado. Smoke travels, and some say that sunshine actually makes it more toxic as it moves. A thick haze covers Salt Lake City and asthmatics, old people, and yoga groups have moved indoors. 

A friend responded to my last pandemic post— “I told you so,” saying that “there is no solution as long as people believe it is about ‘freedom’ and not the common good.” I couldn’t help but think of that as I read the fire news. California’s—and Oregon’s—fires crush towns and families in their immediate paths, but their smoke impacts towns and families over a much wider region. Dixie, at over 400,000 acres, is California’s second largest ever, but smoke from Western fires is now routinely discovered over eastern cities—and must be blanketing the entire country in its thin layers.

You can leave your burnt out California house and town, but the entire country is depending on Westerners to control our fires. Likewise, the unvaccinated in Florida, Missouri, and Texas, with government officials cheering them on with shouts of “freedom” are endangering me. And like the small fires closer to home—Elbow on the Grand Ronde, and the Snake River Complex in Idaho—that flooded us with unhealthy air for a few days, the unvaccinated in my own community endanger neighbors and even vaccinated family members, shopkeepers—and me.

We might remember the Golden Rule: Do onto Others… We are all in this together, and even more so now with a virulent version of the virus. The weak, elderly, and anyone unlucky enough to have current health problems, are in the path of the unvaccinated. Even though Wallowa County counts remain relatively small—but rising—our medical facilities are looking west and north to larger medical facilities they might need for patients too ill to treat locally. And finding those facilities filling rapidly with their own populations. 

I understand that there are medical reasons for some to reject vaccinations, but, beyond that, I would like my neighbors to look out for each other—and me. 

Personal freedom always has its edges—soldiers in war know that, and so did old-timer Al Duckett, who explained to an exasperated landowner at a Planning Commission meeting 50 years ago, that “I can’t build my outhouse right next to your well, even if it’s on my own property.”

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