North American Night
North American Night:
Canadian Wildfire Smoke over Pennsylvania
June 14th, 2023; Images from June 6th and 7th, 2023
Oley Valley, Pennsylvania in June 2023
Daytime. Driving on the right again. Those trees sure are green outside Fairmount Park. Mundane observations that seem novel. Taking it all in after 36 sleepless hours again. From the Arabian peninsula directly to Philadelphia; that’s already overwhelming when you consider the terrain. Bears tiptoeing around landmines in the Balkans, soon-to-be NATO war games in German airspace, glistening Alpine meadows, Sinai peninsula watercourses dry like obstinate laughlines– time goes on. The vineyards hugging the Rhine and Danube valleys seem a far cry from Saudi prison or the Donetsk trench, also far below this trans Eurasian flight. But if I had been able to open the window blinds, we might have also seen the fires as we came down into Canada, over the Saint Lawrence valley. On this drive from PHL northwest to where the farm fields just begin – the borderlands between Amish country and suburbia– the smoke was still quite high. Just haze. A talking point. It’s “something to say” Dad grimaced.
By the next night on Tuesday evening, it rolled in like Mordor. Smell: campfire, mixed in with carcinogens. The remnants of homes, cars, all kinds of particulate relics. I didn’t get it yet; I was still jetlagged. I tried to jog up to the pumphouse, but doubled over, feeling what I would imagine asthma is. Up at the reservoir, it’s far darker than it should be. “Fog” draped over the forest hills; an affect was immediate. God, this is foreboding– the pall set in deeper. A figure at the water’s bend. Bleary eyes. Irritants and dismay; a scarlet tanager singing false hope. A father fishing with his son. This feels like the end of time.
Boyertown Reservoir
Wednesday was the day that many of you have seen. New York City turned apocalypse-orange, but in Pennsylvania, it was diffuse yellow and glum grey. The subtlety was worse; driving to Oley with Mom, restive cows chewing cud under a red-orange orb. Graveyards not foggy, but thick with smoke. Like Centralia, it’s another metaphor; we dug too deeply, perturbed Earth’s Carbon Cycle too austerely. Declension spread like butter over the Anthropocene.
The scientist/science teacher in me knows one event can’t be ascribed to human induced climate change. And of course, the preconditioning was there for this fire to get out of control: decades of suppression, a dry spring and summer (and now poised to be an El Niño year), etc. But certainly wildfire intensity and magnitude is projected to increase in many climate change scenarios. “Wet gets wetter, dry gets drier” is usually the maxim; plus, earlier seasonal snowmelt (drier late spring) and increased insect herbivory (dead trees = more tinder) in a hotter world means that we can expect a good deal more of this.
My N95 mask exacerbates my jaw disorder, so I can barely talk. Suffocation, either way.
