117. Pandemic, Heat, Smoke

This morning the Wallowa Valley is under a layer of smoke. It’s hard to tell whether the smoke is from Northern California, Southern Oregon, or closer Washington and Idaho fires. It follows weeks of surreal summer temperatures, over 100 degrees in June, in the upper 80s and 90s ever since. Little rain; only a brief lightning storm that ignited fires in Joseph Creek on our side of the border and across the Snake River in Idaho. 

The heat has made Wallowa Lake the warmest it’s been in my 50 years here, good for swimming, but scary for fish. Because the rivers, streams, and the ocean shores are also too warm, starfish and shellfish are dying on the coast, and salmon are threatened everywhere. 

A couple of years ago, a friend caught a tagged salmon on the Imnaha and was able to trace its journey up the Columbia as far as the Deschutes, where it found the main stem temperatures too warm and darted up that other river to cool. Weeks later it made its journey back to the Columbia and swam past four Snake River dams to the Imnaha. That’s a small miracle, but one unlikely to be repeated often enough to save a run. 

Fish don’t get their oxygen from the air, but the four-leggeds, two-leggeds, and the birds do. Dogs and people here are complaining. Like they complained about the heat; like they complained about Covid-19 and/or government-imposed restrictions. 

We’ve mostly forgotten about Covid—even the weeks of mask-wearing and fear. My fear is that we’ll forget about this heat and smoke come fall, chalk it up to an abnormal year—records are meant to be broken—or maybe it was that weird el nino current—and go about our business 

We’ll plan new vacations now with travel restrictions lifted; we’ll build more houses in the trees, and we’ll get new air conditioners. 

Or will Napa Valley people move north en masse? Will the broader public embrace the vaccines, build better health care and child care systems, and look for safer places and ways to build their houses?

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39. And now the smoke

A friend and I took a 6-mile bike ride yesterday. We had meant to go longer, but the thick air changed our minds, and we decided on six miles riding slowly so as not to have us huffing and puffing the air’s particles. 

Along a back road we met two women walking, and they were wearing masks. We should have, we said, and they agreed. And for sure, in our town and in cities and towns we see on TV screens, the increase in people wearing masks with fires and smoke is substantial. Covid-19 is not visible like this stuff, and doesn’t sting your eyes and throats.

My son and family drove from Oregon City under an evacuation order on Friday evening, and said the air was thick from there to La Grande. And although their Oregon City home has gone back to level 2, and they are going back today to make sure their home is all right and to try to resume their normal in abnormal times lives, the state’s air now registers mostly “hazardous” from here to Oregon City.

Covid, Portland protests, election trauma, and even fire were somehow not in our back yard. But smoke is. And in this, we are joined by people from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. (In fact, in an ironic twist for our Leader, I think we are now borrowing fire fighters from both countries!)

The Leader is going to California today—not, I imagine, to think that he can gather votes there, but he will certainly be telling voters in swing states that he is doing everything he can for the Left Coast. He might even wear a mask—against the smoke!

Smoke tells us we are all together in this: rural and urban, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, Black, Brown, and White, and, as the winds shift, north, south, east and west. 

Maybe, hopefully, smoke is a lesson in humility that the traumas of 2020 have not yet been able to teach.

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38. And now the fires…

For months that seem like years we’ve watched the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests, listened to Dr. Fauci explain and the President deny the rage of the coronavirus, counted the miles from New York City, then Portland, then Hermiston and La Grande as the disease crept closer. And now the fires.

I’ve been reading about 1918 and its influenza, its war (that would “end all wars”) and how writers now are finding that time again and wondering why it has been so little written about. The influenza I mean. It was gobbled up in the War and the Armistice they say, but now they write that President Wilson had it, and that the Peace that was worked out in Versailles suffered from his disease. That maybe the settling of that War—the huge reparations charged Germany and the carving up of the Middle East by the Europeans with their own national selfishness and little of the interests of the people in mind—would have been different without the Influenza. 

The Influenza was maybe carried initially by a duck to a soldier in Kansas and then to camps and ships to Europe and then tangled up with the War. More soldiers died of the flu than of the fighting, and in all over 600,000 Americans died. Germans too, and some say that the flu helped our side; some say it infected all.

The flu jumped like fire, like our coronavirus jumps now, and “compounded” its effects when it touched war. I think the fire is doing that now, while we watch it rage across California, Oregon, and Washington. It’s chasing evacuees into tight spaces, moving with them and firefighters across the West. And if this flu is like 1918, it will, like fire, go out or underground to emerge again in second and third waves. 

We won’t be able to sum the losses of this season’s fires until the snow flies and they are all out. But we’ll know when they are out and start planning for next year. The virus is trickier. Spot outbreaks here and there. Does it travel with heat or with cold? Will it mutate? Will there be a vaccine, and if so when, and will people take?

Today there is smoke hovering over our valley, reminding us that all of it is close by, just a sudden wind or a few small breaths away.

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