How to Flee a Dying World
It’s our minds, not our bodies, that need somewhere else to go.
I was on my way back home to California in the fall of 2020, crossed the state line south of Ashland and turned off I-5 in Yreka. Highway 3 runs along the Klamath River and I followed it to a friend’s house in Orleans. I woke up in the middle of the night, coughing. The worst of fire season was over, but the August Complex Fire would keep burning on into November. That night, the smoke hung thick in the river valleys, turning the air opaque and leaving me gasping in my sleep. I left at first light and headed for the coast, but the coast was smoked out too.
When you live in your vehicle, you can’t just turn on an air purifier. If you can’t breathe outside, you can’t breathe inside either. Even though #vanlife flourishes on the West Coast, when fire season hits, the great outdoors becomes a prison.
Really, “fire season” out West has become a misnomer. There are just fires. There are always fires. There is no time of guaranteed reprieve, and when the big fires burn, the smoke reaches all the way around the world.
Fall in Northern California is a fitting harbinger of things to come. From the cities to the valley, from the mountains to the coast, when the fires hit, there’s nowhere you can go where they don’t reach you. Air…
