Labor Day, 2020

Nearby Mt. Hood is on fire and we’re having a wind storm, just at the same time that smoke from the California fires and the Washington fires has converged on the river valley where Portland sits. Everything smells like a world on fire. The Air Quality Index is 180.  I started coughing around 5 p.m. and closed all the windows tightly and turned on the air filters. I made this photo from my window at 5:30 p.m. I’m breathing better now, but my eyes burn and my mouth is dry. I look down into the street at a row of tents where houseless people live and wonder how they will survive. My son and his family had planned to go camping in central Oregon, they were to have left today, their last excursion outside their small space before school starts. They postponed and will see how it goes. 

Earlier in the day, before the smoke arrived, I met with a young woman in her thirties whose ex-partner was recently murdered. We talked outdoors, overlooking a rose garden, masked. She told me he had co-parented his two children and her two for years before they broke up in 2018. “We never stopped being friends, we just mutually saw that we needed to let each other go. But he was such a sweet, funny guy. He was innocent, in a way. He loved to paint.” 

She passed me her phone so I could see her photo of his acrylic painting of her two children. Her daughter’s face is a blue spiral; her son’s face is a gold star; their t-shirts and jeans are realistic, but in vivid colors: intense orange, yellow, red, blue, the colors heaped on, probably with a palette knife. She went through the photos on her phone and continued, “He loved nature. He loved kids. He believed in helping people. He wanted to build a safer world, and he was going nuts because of the violence of Trump and his followers. He believed that what they do threatens the lives of all our children.” 

Their families have different politics from theirs and are not helping her. I encouraged her to talk about him, asked her to think about what she needs, how the memorial can help her and the children. She said she hasn’t had time to think. I urged her to take more time. We meditated together, and I taught her a relaxation technique that has worked for me. 

As we talked, the sky was hazy but not yet thick with smoke. By the time I got home, I could barely see the downtown skyline. I called Sue and learned that her son and daughter-in-law had been camping on Mt. Hood and had to get a ride back to their car as there were fires behind them on the trail. I just heard from her. They’re home, safe. I’m so glad.

I see that in 2017, we had a similar situation, but not quite as bad. Ceridwen offered an explanation then that is even more pertinent now: "The situation is frankly apocalyptic in respect to both climatic and to political events. Your country is simultaneously burning in fever and  swamped in a mucksweat like an animal fighting to rid itself of an incubus that is riding it to perdition."