124. Seasons

Yesterday felt like fall—and it’s only mid-August. But the last days of June saw 100 degrees, and felt like a hot August.

 

I don’t know what it’s like to live along that imaginary equatorial line, where the length of days and the warmth of the sun doesn’t change with any calendar. But a few score miles off the line, seasons of dry and wet seem to be normal; and further away, in what we call “temperate” zones north and south, the length of sunlight each day grows and wains, and the earth’s rotations and distances from sun make for seasons. We count four: spring, summer, fall, winter. 

 

Covid and climate change seem to be radically disturbing our calendars—and our seasons. Hot in spring and now it cools down—for a day or two. It looks like summer is coming back. Will we have a fall? 

 

Fire season across the West has grown, until California counts no season at all. They are on the pyretic equator. Tornados, hurricanes, and torrential floods are blurring their traditional seasons in the Southeast. Droughts in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America are mixing with leadership failure and war and causing mass hunger and migration. 

 

And even the Covid seems to be defying its expected seasons. We had been warned of a fall or winter spike; it’s happening now. Unless this isn’t yet the spike! Wallowa County, which almost completely escaped the first wave and a few since, now sees 6 and 10 new cases daily.

 

All of this has created great confusion in schools. It took decades to come to the “school year” shared by most American towns and cities. We were mostly agricultural, and the school year become gradually longer with fewer farmers, but we’ve held onto late spring to early fall—in our county irrigation to harvest—as summer vacation.

 

And sports have become attached to seasons: summer to baseball with better weather; basketball to indoor winter; and football to the fall. A little rain, mud, or snow didn’t stop a football game. Seemed—until artificial turf and indoor stadiums, to define the sport. 

 

After all these years, football is my favorite season, though I watch little of it on TV, and can’t tell you who won the last super bowl—in basketball season! I can remember the coastal dew and smell of the grass at Oceanside High School in 1950s California, the warm and slanted light Saturday afternoons at UC Riverside in the early sixties. I don’t have much memory of specific games or of personal achievements, but remember teammates, 3-a-day practices, bus rides, and the band playing on Friday nights. I think I could still sing the alma mater.

 

In all, I only played six or seven years of football, deciding as a senior in college that rugby was a better sport. But watching son Matt and Joseph High play and lose to arch-rival Enterprise on a snow-covered field in Joseph, and him leave it all on the field in a near win against the same team the next year; and watching grandson Trey’s crushing tackles and an impossible fingertip touchdown catch in a state 6-man championship game which he and his proud teammates won, ginned up my own old dreams of fall.

 

But Covid gave us football in March and basketball in April this last school year, with track squeezed in on the ends. And now Covid is peaking out of its season, and what with Covid masks and smoke blowing in from California’s extended fire season, there might not be a high school football season this fall.

 

“Season” seems to be losing its meanings. 

 

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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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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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36. Pandemic, fire, hurricane…

Two things I’ve learned in reading about the 1918 Influenza: how scatter-shot it moved across the world; and, as author Laura Spinney says, how it struck people “privately and individually” (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World). There are no public monuments to it, towns, streets, or buildings named after it, as there are for wars, industrialists, and leaders of armies and countries. And because the flu paid no attention to borders or even oceans, pulling together global information on its origins and spread has been a hundred years in the doing.

Today, although there are calls for national masking and distancing, school and business closures, and the quick discovery of a vaccine, Covid-19 creeps across the nation like a fire, finding fuel here and there, blowing up and settling down in one place and another, mimicking the flu-spread of 1918-19. And like the fires now raging in California and Colorado and the most recent hurricane, the impact of Covid-19 is brutal and capricious in the people it plucks from homes and communities. 

And like fire—or hurricane—Covid-19 has not directly distressed a majority of Americans. Inconvenienced and scared, yes, but the 185,000 dead and 5 million infected are still a small minority. Even the 30 million Americans out of work are a minority, and social nets and government spending have kept most—not all—of them afloat. Most Americans are adapting to a more restricted world—airlines and foreign travel is down; camping, RV sales, and the stock market are up. 

In our town, the inconveniences and even disasters that threatened in March have given way to a robust tourism season with most—though not all—businesses thriving. The license plates read Arizona, Florida and Texas as well the more familiar Idaho and Washington. No Chief Joseph Days Rodeo, but the Eagle Cap Wilderness is full of hikers, and they are standing in line for outdoor seating at La Laguna.

Our TV screens, like those in Hoboken or Lincoln, go from Covid to fire to hurricane to Black Lives Matters. One part of America watches another part burn, run from hurricanes, protest, or die with Covin-19 in another part of America, as we wait for the rains to come, hurricane season to pass, and something bigger—a Salk vaccine or an election, to calm our waters. 

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