Hello friends,
I remember clearly one of the moments that climate change became very real to me.
In 2017, I was on a plane from Washington, D.C., approaching Portland at night. Below, the forests to the east of the city were on fire. As the plane approached the airport, the cabin filled with the faint smell of wildfire. To the south, Mt. Hood hulked, a charcoal gray smudge encircled by a smoky haze. This was in September, when I was in the midst of moving back to Oregon. Always before the mountain had represented a homecoming. But this night it gave me ominous chills.
My father's minivan was in the long-term parking lot, and when I retrieved it, the windshield was covered in ash. I was in the final phases of moving him and all of his stuff, including his woodworking gear. It was my task that week to drive to the landfill to toss the unwanted contents of his workshop into the dump. It was hot, smoky and hazy, and by the time I was done, I was sweaty and covered with grit. It felt as though the end of the world was just around the corner. Yet this was home, and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, not anymore.
The fires have only worsened since then. In 2020, Portland was socked in for days on end by air too thick to breathe. Smoke has always part of summer in the West. It's a necessary part of the life of forests, not an anomaly. But this kind of smoke, the kind that socks in cities for weeks? It's a new and unwelcome foreshadowing of even darker days, as our weather patterns change and the planet continues to warm.
The memory of the moment on the plane returned to me this week as the major cities of the East Coast experienced for the first time the conditions that we have come to know in the West. They represent the smell and sight and even the feel of climate change—physically, what the tiny particulates do to your cardiovascular system. They represent the taste, too. Because the ashy scrim lingers everywhere, in everything, coloring and flavoring our surroundings.
Now do you see? Do you get it?
I am not proud of those two sentences. Or the told-you-so feelings that arose seeing the New York City skyline juxtaposed against smoke from fires in the far North. Because to live with unreliable air quality is an existential threat. And I do not wish that fear—that awakening, that orange hellscape—on anyone. To be made aware of the precarity of our breath on a warming planet is to confront not only our mortality—one day we will all offer up a final exhale, after all—but the reality of what we've done to make it harder to breathe. Once you know, you can't look away.
And of course, the smoke six years ago was not my first personal connection or encounter with climate change. As many of you know, that came 10 years earlier, when I saw methane flares on the prairies of North Dakota. It was then and there, seeing the waste of all that methane burning right in front of me, that I understood. The checks my family got from the oil companies were tiny, but we had a part in the warming that was changing the weather. Those flares on the prairie portended forest fires elsewhere. It was already in our atmosphere, in every one of our inhales.
All of these memories washed over me yesterday, at an immersive art exhibit at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. The exhibit is called FLÓÐ (Flood), by the Icelandic musician Jónsi of the band Sigur Rós, and it forecasts how rising oceans will challenge our survival.
You enter a long, dark room lit only by a strip of light that runs across the ceiling. The light flashes and changes in concert with the waves of sound from Jónsi's composition. It's blue like ocean, dark like a moonless night lit by flashes of lightning. The sound comes at you from dozens of speakers around the room. There is fog, too, which is scented with a tincture of seaweed harvested from the North Atlantic.
Chris and I made our way to a side wall, and then sank to the floor, resting on our backs. The sound thumped, a deep bass. The lights flashed. It was simultaneously a withdrawal of all senses and an intensification of them—I shivered, the frisson of sensory engagement. We were surrounded by our inescapable future. But where else would we be?
Yours,
Erika
Beautifully written piece Erika. “Once you know, you can’t look away.” I need a Seattle trip now!