MISSOULA, Mont. — “I wouldn’t go out without an N95 mask,” an oncology nurse told me the other day. She wasn’t referring to Covid-19 protections. Cases here remain quite low. I’m vaccinated. Besides, I wasn’t planning to be indoors. It was for the smoke.
The nurse was responding to a question I posed on Twitter last week as the air quality in my town degraded before my eyes, from “moderate” to “unhealthy for sensitive groups” to plain “unhealthy.” I had planned to enjoy a midmorning trail run through the valley, usually one of the perks of summer in Montana. But when I opened the door, it smelled like a campfire.
The hills just across the valley were faint through the gauzy haze. After 18 months of worrying about masking and health risks from being indoors, I now wondered the reverse. Was it safe to exercise outside?
I went for my run, but I paid for it. I didn’t breathe the air, I chewed it. For the next day, I had a smoke hangover, marked by a dull headache, light wheeze, and a strange, bone-deep fatigue. But you don’t have to exercise to feel smoke malaise. My partner and I wake up cranky each morning and we seem to argue more lately over silly things. My neighbors have reported red, itchy eyes, greasy hair, and gnawing sinus pain just walking outside. As Covid’s Delta variant sweeps the country, Westerners have a new game to play: Smoke or Covid?
Fire season in the West isn’t a new phenomenon. Longtime residents of the western third of the country are used to periods of smoke in late summer. They’ve long monitored drought conditions and crossed their fingers when a thunderstorm rolls through, knowing a lightning strike could ignite acres. The smoke is arriving earlier each year. Fire season is fast cannibalizing another season: summer.
At its best, summer in the West is a unique glory. Endless days begin with chilly mornings and give way to a comfortable, dry heat perfect for hikes through perfumed pine forests before a beer and a dunk in a crystal clear mountain runoff stream. Living here in the land where air-conditioners weren’t common made an outdoorsman out of even a transplant scarred by the East Coast’s crushing humidity.
Now the region’s most precious perk is threatened by a warming planet and the drought, intense heat and erratic weather it’s causing. The raging fires, so big they are visible from space, are changing the physical landscape of the West. They’re blotting out the sky in this swath of the country and robbing the people of their time in nature. Last week, Missoula had the sixth-worst air quality in the nation.
I’m writing this dispatch from my kitchen because it’s closest to our newly installed air purifier and is thus the room in the house with the safest air. The great outdoors has given way to the great indoors and the loss feels incalculable. Children, who missed out on a year’s worth of normalcy to quarantine, are now losing a season of outside play. Summers in Montana beckon us outside and lift our moods. When winter ends, there is a collective euphoria. Fifteen hours of daylight somehow don’t feel like enough, so people set up tents and sleep outside, soaking up every possible minute of nature.
Trapped inside, I might as well be anywhere. I am ashamed to admit, returning home from a quick trip this week, that I felt pangs of resentment as my plane descended into the valley where I live. I resented the smoke, I resented the man-made climate crisis causing the smoke. I even resented the season itself. Most of all, I resent that sepia-toned summers are likely to be my new normal. As my partner noted recently, I’m experiencing grief. I’m mourning the loss of a seasonal joy and freedom that I only recently discovered.
Wildfire smoke threatens our health in ways many of us don’t fully understand. Its tiny particles, which lodge deep in the recesses of our lungs, are a danger to asthmatics, as well as those with chronic health conditions like hypertension and heart disease. Inhaling the ash means breathing in elevated levels of lead, zinc and any number of chemicals.
The long-term effects of choking smoke are only recently being examined and the evidence thus far is not good. A study underway in a nearby town of Seeley Lake, Mont., has shown a significant decline in lung function for residents who endured hazardous air quality back in the 2017 fires. In Alberta, Canada, new research revealed persistent lung damage in firefighters who battled a 2016 wildfire. Definitive research is pending, but it seems that smoke fallout could very well be the West’s — and then the country’s — next health epidemic.
Even air quality experts are still trying to wrap their heads around this crisis. Sarah Coefield, who heads up Missoula’s smoke readiness program for the local health department, said that when the valley was socked in with dangerous levels of smoke in 2017, the county was completely unprepared.
“These extreme smoke events are a few decades old but the frequency we’re seeing is still quite new,” she said. “In 2017, I didn’t know half of what I know now about indoor ventilation systems. Many of us still assumed most indoor buildings had clean air during fires.”
Ms. Coefield’s research since 2017 has shown that the air quality in many of the town’s public buildings during extreme smoke events is nearly as dangerous as the air outside. Her team found that many HVAC systems were outdated, missing filters or broken altogether.
“We want to tell people to go inside for clean air — to the mall or the office or the movie theater,” she said. “We don’t even know if the air they’re breathing there is clean.” Part of the problem is a lack of government funding to address the impacts of wildfire smoke.
The smoke events are increasing in frequency and many residents are still uneducated as to how to clean the air in their homes. Smoke comes in even if the windows are closed. Without air-conditioning, many are forced to keep their windows open to help stave off the heat.
There are no good options in fire season. You cannot avoid the air. In the early days of spring, we purchased tickets to a local music festival in mid-July. It was an act of hope that vaccines would be available. We imagined camping and dancing and gathering with friends and strangers under the stars. When the time came, it appeared there would be no stars to dance under — only an unhealthy haze.
Once again, in the name of health, we canceled plans. Montana is just two weeks into this fire season, but it feels like an eternity. June’s blue skies and outdoor adventures already feel like a distant memory. For now, the West’s magical season is starting to feel a bit like the cold, gray days of 2020 — full of ennui and days spent inside.
Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) writes “Galaxy Brain,” a newsletter about technology, media and politics. He previously worked as an Opinion writer-at-large for The New York Times and a senior technology writer at Buzzfeed News.
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