Hold Your Breath: Summer’s Almost Over

Mary Baird
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

The heat of the day and the blazing sun can only mean one thing. August is here, and it’s about to leave. That means last minute vacation plans, pool parties, late nights, an anticipation for the coming football season, and school shopping.

Everyone is getting ready for the season to end, but those preparations may be more than just a backpack, some lined paper, and one last popsicle. For many, that means bracing themselves.

Along the West Coast, wildfires wreak havoc on the landscape and the air quality every year. While some just notice this as a hazier sky or a slight smell in the air, for other people it is a real problem.

“It’s hard to breathe,” said Kyla Ewing, a twenty-year-old graduate student who drove through the smoky Oregon hills on her way to school. The 156 mile trip took her through the area heavily affected by the Terwilliger Fire area. “I get bad headaches and I can’t concentrate. It knocks me out for the day.”

It’s not only sedentary students who struggle with air quality. Athletes, children, the sick and the elderly can be seriously hurt by the effects of forest fire smoke. A study covered the University of California San Francisco saw that while adults usually recovered, even from extreme instances, it was the children, sick, and elderly who were harmed the most by the smoke from these ever-more-present forest fires. Whether people like it or not, the health of the sick, the elderly and the young affect everyone, especially when you begin to realise just how integral they are in day-to-day life.

Even when a forest fire doesn’t threaten to destroy your home or anything you love, it can still put a limit on what you’re willing and unwilling to do. For one mother in the Wood Village area, it meant hesitation about sending her son to a camping trip with friends; a hesitation due in part to the boy’s severe asthma.

For the sake of confidentiality, let’s call this boy Peter. Peter was good friends with my family, and our families knew each other very well. Our family had helped his move houses five times in the span we’d known each other, and trust was implicit in that relationship. However, his mother, Ann, was hesitant to let him accompany us to Timothy Lake, an artificial lake in Mount Hood National Forest. There had been fires there, started either by lightning or by careless, reckless humans, and although it was not a very dangerous fire (especially compared to the infernos raging to the south), it put out a lot of smoke.

Timothy Lake is a good 40 minute drive from a town larger than a ski resort, and if a medical emergency occurred, we knew there likely wouldn’t be time to get Peter to safety. So, what was the decision? Safety, in exchange for a lost experience, or the experience of freedom at the cost of threatened death? Ann left it to her son to decide which path he would walk.

Peter decided to go up to the mountain. A week of experiencing innate and wonderful joy surrounded by nature and man coexisting, he kayaked across the beautiful lake, learned new board games, and went for long walks on the nature trails in the fir country. He did not die, nor come close to it (except perhaps once when his kayak nearly overturned when his friends became a tad too rambunctious). He returned home, safe and sound, and Ann was glad to have him back in cell range.

However, not every trip can be that lucky, and not every child with asthma gets the choice of whether to be near the smoke or not. To keep them from harm, our option remains to either develop a better system for dealing with the pollution around us or to do all we can to decrease the occurrence of these fires.

We cannot become accustomed to the end of August being the beginning of school and the beginning of smoke.

Mary Baird

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A student at George Fox University with a vested interest in seeing the world last another generation.