If you don’t live somewhere near the fires, it’s hard to explain what late August actually looks like out here some years. Not every year, but enough of them now that I’ve stopped being surprised. The sky doesn’t go dark exactly, it goes this flat orange-brown, like somebody put a filter over the sun, and by the time my shift wraps around six in the morning I’m driving home through air that tastes like a campfire that’s three states away and somehow still in your throat.
I’ve worked nights long enough that my body’s clock is already backwards from most people’s, but smoke season adds a second layer of wrong on top of that. Normal night shift, you come off work into a sunrise, which is at least pretty, gives you something to look at on the drive. Smoke season, you come off work into this dim, hazy nothing that doesn’t look like morning or night, just a kind of gray that makes it hard to tell your body which one it’s supposed to be pretending is happening.
The warehouse itself handles it fine, we’re indoors, climate controlled, the trucks run regardless. But loading and staging happens partly outside, and there’ve been nights where visibility on the yard is bad enough that we’re moving slower than usual just to be careful, and you can taste it even standing right at the dock doors. A few of the older guys on the crew who’ve been out here longer than me talk about a time before this was a regular thing, when a bad fire season was the exception instead of something you pencil into the calendar the way you’d pencil in a slow month for produce.
Renata works days, so this is one of the times of year our schedules line up worst, she’s heading into a smoke advisory on her commute in while I’m coming home from one on mine, and we mostly just compare notes about air quality numbers like other couples compare notes about traffic. We keep the windows shut for weeks straight some summers, run the air purifier we bought after the first bad year, and postpone anything outside, no walks, no sitting on the porch with a book, which is usually where I do a good chunk of my actual reading once the weather’s decent.
It’s strange how something that started as an occasional bad week has become a season with its own routines now, its own gear, its own way of talking about the air quality index the way you’d talk about the weather anywhere else. I don’t love it. But it’s part of living here now, the same way the actual winter is, and you adjust your habits around it same as anything else that shows up reliably enough to plan for.