Burning Eyes and Existential Dread
Spending a week breathing the worst air on the planet
My eyes blink open.
I take my first breath of the day. It is shallow and unsatisfying.
My chest is congested. I have a pounding headache. My throat is so scratchy it feels like I swallowed a Brillo pad.
Shaking off a now-familiar and pervasive brain fog, I reach for my phone. For what feels like the thousandth time, I type in the web address for the Air Quality Index for Portland, Oregon — my smoke-blanketed home.
In the five seconds it takes for the results to load, I feel real, tangible hope. It is quickly dashed.
The red “Unhealthy” portion of the meter is pretty bad. The purple “Very Unhealthy” section is even worse. That ominous looking maroon “Hazardous” section, though? You don’t ever want to find out firsthand what that’s like. It is that section in which we once again find ourselves today.
I set my phone down, walk slowly to the stove, and put on a pot of tea.
How did we get here?
“Once-in-a-lifetime Weather Event”
On the evening of Wednesday, September 8th, howling winds rattled the windows of my small apartment in Portland, Oregon, and startled my normally unflappable cat.
All night long, the SNAP of large tree branches breaking off and falling to the ground could be heard.
While I knew that this same wind was combining with an intense, dry heat and extremely low humidity to create enormous, volatile, and completely un-contained wildfires across the state, I did not know just how much havoc it would wreak on the city of Portland.
By Thursday morning, a thick, dense layer of wildfire smoke blanketed the sky. Unearthly orange light, the likes of which I had never before seen, flooded the city. The sun — peaking out only occasionally from behind its ethereal curtain — burned a strange bright red.
Seeing the apocalyptic scene outside, and smelling the familiar scent of wood-smoke — which burned my nostrils as I inhaled — I quickly closed the windows of my stuffy apartment and flipped on the local news station.
The solemn weatherperson spoke of a “once-in-a-lifetime weather event” which had caused so many fires, so quickly, that one-million acres of Oregon forests were burning.
While high winds had helped cause the fires and had subsequently brought smoke into the Willamette Valley, the winds had since calmed, leaving the smoke hanging still and motionless over Portland.
The smoke was strange and kind of scary, sure, but what was the big deal?
The weatherperson explained that smoke inhalation can lead to sore throat, burning eyes and nose, congestion, coughing, sneezing, and nausea.
Oh, I see.
The very next news story showed empty store shelves. Air purifier machines, apparently, were sold out all across the state. The lingering smoke was going to reduce air quality to very dangerous levels, it seemed, and the more well prepared Oregonians had already set about guarding themselves and their homes against the noxious onslaught.
It was at this moment that I realized this disruption, this smoke, this strangeness, would not be a benign or quickly passing phenomenon, and that I needed to try to do something about it.
The Hopeless Hunt
Okay, so I had reacted too slowly to warnings of smoke and of poor air quality and had missed my chance to secure an air purifier from a local hardware store. No matter. I’ll just order one online, right?
Not so fast.
A thorough Amazon search revealed that it would take about seven days to receive an air purifier. It didn’t matter which brand I chose, it didn’t matter the shipping method, it didn’t matter that I was an Amazon Prime member. The very soonest I could hope to clean the wretched, smoky air in my apartment was in seven days.
This was not good news.
While scrolling frantically through the various internet message boards, I discovered that one can create a do-it-yourself, makeshift air purifier at home. Simply strap a furnace air filter to the back of a box fan and voila! Clean air.
I resolved that first thing the next morning, I would charge bravely out into the Mad Max smoke world and rescue my home.
After a hot and fitful night of sleep, I awoke with a sore throat and a fierce determination. I tied one, then two, then three bandanas around my face — I don’t have a respirator or N-95 mask — and walked out into the eerily silent and smoke-filled streets of Portland. I would defeat this wicked weather affliction yet!
Not so fast.
Trips to three different stores revealed that air filters, too, were sold out everywhere. The box fan secret, of which I was so proud, and which I thought would surely save me, was apparently not such a secret at all.
Defeated, exasperated, and having already spent far too much time in the acrid smoke, I returned home. Despite my best efforts, it seemed there was nothing I could do to improve the air quality in my apartment.
I threw my body down on the couch and struggled to catch my breath. I started scrolling through the internet feed of doom.
I made it to about the fourth picture of a friend’s cute kid before the targeted advertising assaulted me: Air purifiers. The internet had learned of my need and it was adding insult to injury. Damn you, targeted advertising. Damn you.
Nowhere To Go
After another sleepless night, the morning began with coughs and wheezes and a splitting headache. After a steamy shower and a cup of tea, I had a brilliant idea.
“Well,” I thought, “If I can’t do anything about the air quality in Portland, maybe I can just LEAVE Portland! Take a little vacation to somewhere with clean air”.
Genius, right?
Sadly, that old sage, Google, revealed to me with heartless indifference that there really was nowhere within a 300 mile radius in any direction that I could possibly go to completely avoid smoke and dangerous air quality.
Cities as far away as Seattle, Boise, and San Francisco were no better. Even if I could somehow find a magical reprieve from the smoke, the amount of time I would need to spend in the car to get there — thus exposing myself to said smoke — meant that the whole idea was a non-starter.
Completely out of ideas — no air purifiers, no DIY air purifiers, and no escape forthcoming — I finally resigned myself to the truth. I was stuck in a suffocating world of smoke, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Resignation
On Saturday, the third day of this bizarre nightmare, the air quality somehow got worse. Again. The smoke was now so thick, so all-encompassing, so palpable, that I could literally taste it. A thick, foul, toxic soup, hanging in the air, choking my breath and battering my resolve.
According to IQAir.com, which measures the air quality around the world, Portland now had the worst air quality of any major city in the world.
I spent the morning going around my apartment with packing tape, covering every window gap and crack I could find. I closed the blinds and drapes, figuring that any layer of protection between the window and me was better than nothing.
While this action seemed to have a mildly positive effect on the air I was breathing, it also had an unintended negative effect on the atmosphere in my home and on my mental and emotional health: It was now dark as night, completely without natural light.
It would remain so in the days to come, creating a sort of weird, timeless, suspended animation, wherein all I could do was sit, wait, and hope.
Having done all I could to improve or overcome my situation — and having mostly failed — all that was left to do was settle in. To try to breathe as well as I could, to sleep as well as I could, and to wait for brighter days — and better air — ahead.
Beyond Index
On Sunday, the fourth day of my new, smoky hell, the air quality danger reached its zenith.
That morning, the cumulative physical effect of four days of smoke inhalation hit me like a ton of bricks.
My nostrils burned. My throat was sore. My brain was enveloped in a fog of confusion and indifference. I was lightheaded. I was nauseous. I couldn’t concentrate well enough to read a book or complete a project. All I could do was stare blankly at the television or computer screen. Even that was tiring.
Imagine my horror, then, when I opened the Air Quality Index for the first time that day and saw that the meter had gone beyond the ominous maroon “Hazardous” zone and now simply read “Beyond Index”.
Our air quality was now so bad that it had broken the EPA’s metrics of calculation. It had become impossible to quantify the levels of toxicity we were now experiencing.
In disbelief, I turned on the local weather report.
To my indescribable relief, the weatherperson indicated that a weather system bringing rain and, thus, relief from the smoke would be moving in by Tuesday.
“This smoke is more awful than I could have imagined,” I thought, “but at least it will be over in two days”.
Two more days of fog and nausea. Two more days of listlessness and anxiety. Two more days without a good, clean breath of air.
I awoke Tuesday like a kid on Christmas morning. I didn’t even take the now customary moment to review and evaluate how I was feeling. I just reached for my phone instantly to check the weather report, sure that the sweet rains of relief would come pouring down any minute.
Instead, the weather app reported, the winds had shifted. The rains would not be coming. The air quality would not be improving. The smoke would be here to stay for at least a few more days.
Dread
Today is my eighth day living in the worst air quality anywhere on planet earth. Today is my eighth day breathing in toxic, smoke-filled breaths. Today is my eighth day living this nightmare, but it feels like my 80th.
It is impossible to describe how awful it feels not to be able to breathe clean air.
Aside from the physical effects that I’ve already discussed — brain fog, restlessness, lightheadedness, nausea, sore throat, congestion, burning nostrils— there are the mental and emotional effects. The fear. The anxiety. The uncertainty. The sadness. The existential dread.
The dread, let me tell you…the dread is the worst of all.
Dread is nothing new to most of us. Especially this year. We’re already living through a global pandemic, an eroding democracy, and revolution in the streets. Mentally and emotionally, for most of us, it’s already “all hands on deck”. In the midst of all that, though, to take away breath?
Breath is something we all take for granted. Clean, breathable air is such a simple and important pre-requisite for survival, for happiness, that we rarely even consider it. When that air is suddenly gone, when the act of taking satisfactory deep breaths is no longer possible and the needed oxygen is not getting through? Dread.
Imagine standing with your face directly over a campfire and taking a deep breath in. Can you feel it? Can you taste it? Now imagine that this is what the air is always like, 24 hours a day, every day.
Dread.
Aside from the dread of not having clean air to breathe, of living under a blanket of smoke that chokes and smolders and mocks, there is the dread of hope being dashed again and again.
Several times now, I have been told by weather experts that relief was on the horizon. First the smoke was supposed to clear out this past Sunday. Then Tuesday. Then today. The goalposts keep moving. The smoke is still here.
I keep looking at daily weather reports and seeing rain clouds — sweet relief — on a collision course with Portland. Each time, at the last minute, they change course and fail to reach us.
I feel like I’m stranded on a desert island, and the rain clouds are rescue ships passing ever closer. I wave my arms and yell frantically, but they don’t see me. They don’t rescue me. I’m still stranded.
This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life.
The physical and emotional pain comes not just of my own suffering, but of knowing that one-million acres of my state have burned. That thousands of Oregon residents have lost their homes forever. That at least ten lives have been lost.
The knowledge that the ashes that rain down from the sky like snowflakes are the remnants not just of charred trees, but also of the burned bodies of the animals and people that could not escape the flames, is almost too much to bear.
Hope?
I am exhausted. I am drained. I am sad. I feel sick.
All is not lost, though, because today I once again have hope.
The weather forecast calls for rain tomorrow. Like a true eternal optimist — or a foolish masochist, take your pick — I believe it.
There is a beautiful little number sitting next to the picture of the rain drop on the weather forecast. It says 90%. That is how likely it is that the rain will fall, will vanquish the smoke, will end this nightmare.
The weather experts on TV sound really hopeful this time.
I look at an animated “smoke forecast” map that shows the entire blanket of gray being lifted off of Portland by Sunday morning. The image of Portland completely uncovered, with not even a hint of smoke over it, nearly brings me to tears.
I have seen this forecast before. I have had this hope before. I believe that this time, it may be different.
