Being Driven Inward and More Inward
Notes From Oregon
September 7, 2020 20:43
Smoke blows in with high winds from the east.
The windchimes are going strong.All the lights are out.
Writing with the aid of a solar powered lamp.
September 8, 2020 8:56
Ash blows around like snow flurries in air that is thick with smoke. Haze turns the trees dusky shades of green. The daylight seems long in reaching the ground.
September 11, 2020 21:49
The air is hazardous with smoke. We keep being driven more
inward and more inward.
September 12, 2020 11:37
My cousin asks me where I am.
I tell her, “In the thick of the Oregon smoke.”
“…and you haven’t bailed already because…” she responds.
She offers me up a spare room in her house, in a state states away from where I am, encourages me to leave, to come and stay with her “until this… blows over.”
Should I leave? Should we leave? If we wanted to, could we even drive from here to there? With two cats?
I’m not tied to this place. I don’t have to stay.
My friend and I talk about it all. It’s bad. But not bad enough to up and leave. Not if we stay inside. Not if we keep on top of things. Not if we don’t breathe the air.
Still, I’m touched by my cousin’s kindness and concern.
September 13, 2020 17:42
This year tests my ability to deal with/handle/address/be presented with uncertainty.
I’m being drive further and further inside.
September 13, 2020 21:50
It’s been a week of smoke. A week of being indoors.
Tired of burning eyes and the trepidation of deep breathing.
Saw a video of my dad outside in clean air – and almost couldn’t accept it as real. There are places like that?
I’m ready for the fires to be out, I’m ready for the smoke to be gone.
Between September 7 and 18, 2020
The doors are all shut. The fans with their filters are doing their bests to keep our inside air breathable. Even with the windows and the doors shut, the filters turn brown with ash and dark with smoke particulates.
I get up as the sun does, but the smoke guards the light. Is it morning? Is it night? What is this world through these windows? I sit at my computer and work on a novel. When I glance up from the fictional outside world, I’m surprised by the smoke, surprised by the haze in the real outside world. Not surprised by people who walk by wearing masks – even if some of them have upgraded to bulbous respirator masks. What a funny year this is. What a strange time.
Over the course of the week, I go outside once to get the mail. I open up the door once to put a spider out—apologizing to it for kicking it out of the house and into the hazardous air. “Sorry, spider.”
I keep my packed bags by the door. The chances of the fire reaching us now is slim. Slimmer. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be ready. Just in case. I feel awful for those who have had to evacuate. For those who’ve lost their homes and farms. Or their very lives. For those who are on the stage 2 alert of Be Set. There’s a tense apprehension that goes with constant readiness.
I feel restless. I knew I liked being outside, but didn’t know how much I relied on walks to reset creativity, to keep me active, and to keep me sane. One day, I pace the room, back and forth, back and forth. The cat doesn’t know what to think. I try to get my heartrate up, but I have to turn and go the other way again before I can get up to any real speed. Maybe walking, even inside, wasn’t so great an idea. I cough. My chest feels tight. There’s a familiar wheeze, reminding me of my childhood asthma, at the catch of each breath. The inside air is cleaner than the outside air, but who knows what I’m breathing in right now.
The walls feel close.
The smoke will last forever.
Will the smoke last forever?
I go back to my desk and back to my fictional world. It’s a relief to forget from scene to scene where I am.
September 16, 2020 22:02
The air quality index is down to 89! Moderate! This morning it was still in the 300s and hazardous. This feels like the start of a new life. One that once again includes breathable air outside. Oh the simple joys that aren’t so simple.
It rains.
Oh blessed, washing, drenching rain.
After September 18, 2020
When the smoke clears, I see that Fall has arrived. Trees changing color from tiptop down, from outward in, from inward out. Shedding yellow and bronze leaves.
The first day when it’s safe to go out and walk, I go out and walk. It feels like Christmas Day with this gift of being safely outside and able to lengthen my stride and move. It’s a gift to breathe air down deep into my lungs without feeling constriction. It’s a gift to see views different from the one I see from the window in front of my desk.
It’s a miracle to see blue sky.
Between September 18 and 23, 2020
We settle back into regular life. The pool, closed to us first because it was being used as an evacuation location and then for poor air quality, opens up again. We go back to swim on our regularly scheduled swim days. I walk outside when I want to go walk. We slowly put evacuation bag items back into their proper places. We wipe walls down, we clean windows, we vacuum and sweep floors, carefully so as not to set ash and smoke dancing in our inside air.
We all but forget about wildfires.
How easy it is to forget what isn’t burning right on one’s own doorstep.
September 23, 2020 18:37
Goshen gets a Level 3 Go Now evacuation order. While here it rains.
Then a bit later, maybe because of the rain, they cancel the Go Now call.
Let my people go home.
When I receive the alert on my phone, I look up Goshen on a map. It’s not that far away. Not close enough to worry, not with the rain. I settle back down to what I was doing.
September 25, 2020 12:11
The Holiday Farm Fire, the one closest to us, is contained to 35%.
Start date: Labor Day
Cause: unknown.
Estimated size: 173,094 acres.
Residences destroyed: 431
Non-residential structures destroyed: 24
The farmhouse where my friend’s friend was born and where his brother was living was burned to the ground. The outhouse was not touched, nor two plastic chairs.
My friend asks him how he feels about it. He talks about the money aspects, about where his brother is living now, not about any emotional attachment to the building, the history, or to the land itself.
All Holiday Farm Fire evacuation notices are cancelled and the containment is holding steady at 35%. People are being allowed to return to their properties.
September 26, 2020 11:18
It’s back to life as usual. For those who had them, bulbous respirator masks have gone back into storage. Regular masks are resumed.
My immersion into my novel world becomes shallower. I feel as if the clearing air takes me from the inward—the delightful inward of creativity (perhaps made possible and more beautiful by the act of being driven inward by a poisonous outside)—and floats me back towards the surface of Usual Life and Regular Responsibilities.
I’m more than grateful for the clean air, for the dismissed smoke, for the freedom to be out-of-doors, but, surprisingly, I miss the bubbled feeling of having nothing else to do but write and nowhere else to be but in an imagined world.
Life is full of strange and conflicting desires.
The sun is out today. Another gift of warmth and light. With my morning writing done and a fresh cup of tea in hand, dressed in layers, I go sit on the porch until my cheeks turn red with heat. All these extremes lately. All or nothing. Inside or outside. Freezing or burning. Cold or hot. Fictional or real. Inward and more inward or outward and even more outward.
I watch the spiders, who have grown three sizes larger from when the smoke first blew in, solid and still in the center of their webs. I watch a hummingbird and a dragonfly. I push up the sleeves of my sweatshirt.
I sit outside and breathe the air.
