The West Has Never Felt So Small

Photos: Wildfires are rage across the American west

Fire has been part of the West for millennia. Ponderosa pines’ sweetly fragrant bark has evolved to shield the heart of the tree from frequent small-scale blazes. The wildflower-spangled meadows of Yosemite were maintained by Indigenous people through careful use of controlled burns. Such meadows were magnets for game and gardens for food plants.

But the post-colonial history of fire suppression and climate change has altered the fires. They are more intense, more frequent, and more wide-ranging. A renewing force has become an obliterating force. These fires burn so hot, they sterilize the topsoil.

Where I live, there are now many smoky days nearly every summer. Everyone checks air-quality apps on their phone constantly. When things get bad, we retreat inside, shut the windows, turn on the fan, play some Zelda. Typically, if the smoke hangs around too long, people who are able to pack up and escape do. They head to the coast, stay with friends, go on an impromptu camping trip, or just spend a Saturday in the mountains above the smoke. This is how we solve problems in the West. We get in our cars and we go.

But while those whose neighborhoods are actively burning are grabbing their duffel bags full of emergency gear and evacuating, most of us sitting in the smoke this week are just sitting in the smoke. For one thing, there’s a viral pandemic happening, and traveling is much riskier and more complicated than usual. My family can’t flee to my mother’s house in Seattle, because she’s 70 years old and has asthma. Every stop for gas or food could be a transmission event. And secondly, very few places from British Columbia to Baja California aren’t bathed in smoke. There’s simply nowhere to go.

As my son said, flinging himself on his bed in his stifling-hot bedroom on a day when the smoke was bad: “I haven’t seen anyone or gone anywhere for six months—and now I can’t even leave the house!” The air inside the grocery store seems alive with a thousand microscopic coronaviruses; the air outside, in the parking lot, is visibly thick with incinerated pines and firs. Every breath is fraught.

Across the West, agricultural, construction, and service workers are forced to breathe in the smoke and the chancy exhalations of customers. There is no healthy, clear place for them to work. The land of big skies and reinvention suddenly feels close, crowded, smothering.

Read: The invisible aftermath of California wildfires

And yet it didn’t have to be this way. Fossil-fuel executives and their favorite politicians knew that their products were going to create the heat and the drought that set the stage for these fires. Their own scientists told them so. They could have guessed that poor folks without air-conditioning and modern tight-sealing windows and desk jobs were going to choke on the ashes. They just didn’t care. And Donald Trump knew that the coronavirus was going to kill Americans, but he “wanted to always play it down” to protect the stock market and his own reelection campaign.