In the summer of 1994 I was ten years old and living in a small town in Eastern Washington. We had a babysitter that summer and her car had a small hole in the floor, just big enough so you could see the street moving under your feet. My sister and I always fought over the seat right above that hole.
The babysitter had taken us downtown. It was a hot, sunny summer afternoon, but as I stepped out of her car I noticed the light around me was a strange gauzy yellow. I looked up and saw a bright red disk above me, a harbinger, it seemed, of the End Times. It was the sun, hidden behind a thick black cloud that was moving quickly across the sky.
This moment marked for me the opening notes of the Tyee Fire Complex of 1994.
The smoke poured into our valley, first obscuring the mountains on the horizon, then the lake. The air tasted of campfire. The windows stayed firmly shut but eventually the inside was saturated with wood smoke as well. We watched helicopters collecting water from the lake with massive buckets at the end of a rope. The grocery store parking lot was packed with Forest Service trucks, the aisles inhabited by dirty, tired young men. A series of fire-themed songs played on the radio between hourly updates on fire containment efforts. There were terrible stories in the newspapers of young firefighters who died.
After a few weeks of this, my siblings and I were sent away to the fresh air and bright blue skies of my grandparents’ farm in a different part of the state. Back home my friends were stuck inside smoke-filled houses, watching with terror as the fire ate its way down the hills to threaten our town. My sister and I were biking up and down the gravel road, eating ice cream for lunch, and complaining that we were missing all the excitement.
It is the spring of 2023. I am thirty-nine years old and I live in Minnesota. I walked my son to school this morning under the gauzy yellow light of the red disk. Smoke from a forest fire in Canada is blanketing our state and has been for a week now. This happened last year too, although much later in the summer. We know the drill. We close the windows, turn on the air purifier, and get on with life.
Every time I look up and see that red disk I am transported back to my ten-year-old self who thought the world might be ending. I already lived through this once; are we really doing it again?
Twenty-nine years and 1,500 miles has not insulated me from forest fires the way I thought it would. And now there is no escape, no farm with fresh air and bikes waiting to take in my family. No part of the nation isn’t affected by forest fire smoke, and the red disk, it seems, is here to stay.