Already workingįrom home to avoid dying in a pandemic, I now toggled absurdly between workĮmails and apocalyptic videos on Twitter of whole communities burning to the Had failed to derail the churning machine of American industry. Months upon months of public health debacles and cultural reckonings
After all, the fires were not even the year’s first majorĭisaster. Prolonged mix of dread, paralysis, tedium, and the surreal, plodding sense ofīusiness as usual.
Those of us just far enough from the flames, the 2020 wildfire season was a Than one million acres and destroyed thousands of homes. Across the state, the fires had burned more Things stayed this way for tenĭays before rain finally arrived. The one time I did, for anĮmergency grocery run, I found the supermarket filled with a thin haze,īlurrily translucent beneath the fluorescents. Officials told people not to leave their homes. Temperature hovered eerily at 57 degrees, day or night. (“Good”) and maxes out at 500 (“Hazardous”), skyrocketed to an incomprehensibleĨ00 and didn’t budge for days. The air quality index, which usually clocks in around 20 The state capital, the sky turned blood red. Smoke, obsessively refreshing the real-time wildfire map for updates. Of us not under evacuation orders barricaded ourselves indoors against the was forced to flee the monstrous Riverside Fire, corralling herĬat and three dogs and four chickens into the car and abandoning her home in Old-growth forests at a rate of three acres per second. The flames spread with disorienting ferocity: the Beachie Creekįire exploded from 500 to 130,000 acres overnight, leveling rural towns and Were fires burning out of control within 20 miles of nearly every major city in More than a dozen wildfires across the state into a frenzy by mid-week, there Two days earlier, a freak Labor Day windstorm had whipped Morning last September, I woke in my apartment in Portland, Oregon, to find theĬity submerged in a viscous stew of yellow-grey smoke, like the color of a Love After the End – Joshua Whitehead, ed.
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