Tuesday morning there was brown fog. Is is still smog when the smoke is from wildfires that are burning hundreds of miles away? Do we need a new term for foreign smoke and local fog blanketing a largely rural region? I looked out over the valley and couldn’t see more than a couple blocks. It reminded me of visits to my Los Angelenos cousins when I think it was actually possible to slice the smog up and plop it on a platter.
But in cities with hundreds of thousands of cars trailing exhaust you expect poor air quality. This is not something a small town anticipates. We have alerts for high pollen counts, but until recently we didn’t worry about smoke. However, this week our town put out a phone alert advising people to stay inside and close windows, minimize time spent outdoors and wear a mask.
Smoke mixed with natural fog is alarmingly dense. The tiny airborne particles that make up the visible part of smoke act as condensation surfaces, pulling water vapor into millions of droplets, each with a core of ash. Breathing it is like breathing dirty water. It feels like drowning and cauterizing your lungs at the same time.
The smoke, whether attached to water droplets or just hanging in the humid air, is making the clean-up work in our town all that more arduous and dangerous. People cleaning out the lower levels, where there are airborne mold spores and other pollutants, are wearing masks to work. I’ve seen many people with respirator masks, not just the COVID variety. To take a break and breathe freely, the natural inclination is to step outside and remove the mask. But it’s almost as dangerous to go mask-free outside as it is in damp basements full of rot. Add a bit of heat, and exhaustion can set in quickly. We have a Red Cross emergency center set up in the town auditorium. There were fewer people heading there during the flood than there are now in the days of clean-up.
I’m almost glad I bought the window unit air conditioner, though I wish there were other options for maintaining good air quality and keeping my body cool enough to sleep. I suspect I’ll be changing the filters on it before the end of the summer if Canada keeps burning. Even so, I’ve left the basement window open a bit because it needs air circulation down there. I don’t have mold, but it sure doesn’t smell healthy. It’s so hard to know the right thing to do in this situation. So I’m just hoping that any smoke that comes in will stay in the basement if there are no air currents to pull it upstairs. But I’m wearing a mask when I am down there even for a few minutes.
Meanwhile, the water is also brown in some places. In my house it is clear, but my office is downtown and the water there is tea. Tests have shown there are no lingering pollutants, so the boil advisory was lifted, but I wouldn’t drink the water down there in the valley. I don’t even think that washing my hands in it is all that effective. I’ve been using a lot of hand sanitizer during this clean-up process.
These catastrophes — fire in Canada, flood in New England — have turned my town into a disaster zone. Only that’s not quite accurate, is it. A disaster is a delimited event. It has an end. A disaster, even a protracted one, will eventually shade back into normal. But there is no normal now. So there is no end. Yes, these particular fires will go out, though July is usually only the beginning of fire season in Canada. So there are many weeks to go before we can expect that cooler autumn weather will quench these flames. But there will be more flames after the snows melt next year. Yes, we will get cleaned up from this specific flood event, but more will happen, and each one will leave accumulating permanent changes in the wake of the receding waters. This house will not be rebuilt. That business will be shuttered. This road will become irreparable. That town is gone. That mountain side is wiped bare. This is no disaster; this is climate change. This is normal for the rest of our lives.
I’ve been trying not to be too dour about this. People in my town are resilient, but they are also exhausted. They want to know that there is an end to the mask-wearing, to the mud-slinging, to the mountains of refuse piling up on the roadsides. How do I look at my co-worker, a young woman with most of her life still to live, and tell her that this is her life? This is all she gets. Her summers will be filled with smog and mud and mold and so much hard and nasty work. She stared out the windows at the brown air, the trash piles, the troupes of mud-splattered volunteers in rubber boots and gas-masks, and she forlornly muttered, ‘I never expected this. Who expected this?’ as if that person who knew it was coming was perhaps the cause of all this misery. How do I say that I did…
Worse, how do I say that this is exactly what was predicted all those years ago when climate scientists and biologists and geologists first began to fret about biophysical collapse? That we have had increasingly explicit warnings for decades, for longer than she’s been alive, for almost as long as I’ve been alive. How do I say that we all knew that this would be her world? And hardly anybody cared…
How do convey that this isn’t a hundred year flood, nor a decadal flood, this is just an average summer storm? All this ruination? All this misery? All this drudging work? This will happen at least once a decade, probably more like once a year. How do you tell the old woman with a foot of mud in her basement that she will face this mess again? And how does she muster then energy to accept that?
Despite the strong ecological proclivities in Vermont, I wonder how many Vermonters really have internalized the messages that science has been getting from the biosphere. How do you understand and accept that disaster is the ground state for every day of the rest of your life? That relief will be the exception. How do you comprehend something like the end of butterflies? The end of bees and ash trees. The end of blue skies and beautiful summer afternoons. The end of clean. The end of solidity and permanence. The end of normal. And how do you relate all that ending to the family vacation in Aruba or the teenager’s new car or the retirement account invested in just about any portfolio of modern enterprise?
I don’t think there is much connecting of those dots. There is too much smog between the things we do to cause biophysical collapse and the effects of doing those things. We are told that the individual things we do don’t matter, that we need to support the economy, that there is no connection between the natural world and our ways of being. Worse, we are told that there is nothing in this that the wonderfully ingenious smart people can’t fix. It’s all in hand. Just around the next corner lies the way back to normal, so we shouldn’t fret. We certainly shouldn’t stop spending money or limit our use of toxic and polluting things. This is all just a rough spot we have to get through. And then we get to live the American fever dream, with no thought of endings and disasters and a general lack of normalcy.
This disconnect is intentional. It is mediated, yes, but it is also deeply woven into our values and cultural biases. This is how we see the world — a world of humans separated from permanent consequences because humans are permanently separated from the world. There is denial, there is some element of choice to what we want to see and what we refuse to see. But there is also just ignorance and an inability to see beyond the images and ideas that our culture feeds us.
And then there are the billions of people who are forced to see, who are immersed in this world of consequences, but who can do little but try their best to survive as each disaster rolls over them.
My heart aches for the young people. Most of the clean-up volunteers are kids, younger even than my sons. And this is their normal. This is all they’ve known. These are their childhood memories and days of savored youth. This is what they can expect for all their long years. Smog in the middle of nowhere. Floods from an average summer storm. Clean-up duty every weekend. And the horrible burden of knowing that nobody cared enough for them to avert this permanent disaster. Nor even to tell them the truth of how this world was made for them.
I told my co-worker that this is what apocalypse looks like. It’s not sudden and overblown drama. It’s not unexpected mayhem. Muddling through it is neither epic nor heroic. It’s just uncovering what was hidden. These kids… there’s no hiding apocalyptic biophysical collapse from them. It’s splattered over their boots and drawn down into their lungs and painted in brown all across their skies.
Maybe that’s what it takes to get us to see. Maybe now that this is normal, maybe now we’ll see what we’ve done. How could you live through this and not finally make the connection? At least the young people will see what we’ve done. And maybe some of their clean-up duties, now that they know, will be scouring our ways of being from their world so that they might look forward to a little relief now and then from all this normalcy.
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 