Smoke

The sky went strange on Tuesday. The smoke was still high up then, from the fires down in Oregon and California and over the mountains here, all of them at once, and the light in my apartment was wrong. Not dark, exactly. Orange, and flat, as if someone had put a filter over the whole city. The sun came up as a red coin and stayed that way, and you could look straight at it.

Then on Thursday night the smoke came down to the ground, and it hasn't left.

Since then it's only gotten worse. Yesterday the air quality here was among the worst anywhere in the world, which is a sentence I never expected to type about Seattle. The mountains are gone. The Space Needle, which I can usually see from the corner, is gone. From my window I can see about four blocks, and past that the city just turns brown and stops. There's ash on the windowsill outside, fine and gray, like someone has been sweeping a fireplace on the roof.

So I'm staying in, like everyone. The windows are shut and I've taped a towel along the gap under the door to the hall, which my mother suggested and which I suspect does nothing. I bought the last box fan at the hardware store on Thursday afternoon, before it came down, and strapped a furnace filter to the back of it with bungee cords, on the advice of the internet, and it hums in the corner and the filter is going gray. I haven't been for a walk since Thursday. I didn't know how much the walks were holding me together until I couldn't take them.

It's a strange thing, after six months of staying inside because the air might be dangerous, to have to stay inside because the air plainly is. At least this time you can see it. I've found that almost a relief, which tells you something about the year.

The forecast says rain might come later this week and clear it. Everyone on my street is waiting for that rain the way they wait for nothing else. I've never wanted Seattle weather so badly in my life.

Mostly I think about the people near the fires, who've lost houses and towns, and feel foolish for writing about a box fan. But this is what it's like here, this week, and I wanted to put it down.