The sky in Ontario is kind of beautiful and awful all at the same time right now, all glowing and orange.
Friends keep sharing sunset pictures of the bright orange skies, and remarking how beautiful it is. Do I tell them it’s wildfire smoke? Do they know? Can a thing be beautiful and terrible all at the same time?
I know that my eyes are stinging and my throat is sore, and that isn’t at all beautiful. I worry about riding bikes in this weather. We’re doing it anyway, but riding shorter distances and not pushing ourselves.
Yesterday we rode from a friend’s cottage to Singing Sands beach. It was lovely, just 20 km, but not our usual summer distances. The air was not very nice. See Canada had some of the world’s worst air quality on Sunday.
Sunday was also the first day of the Friends for Life Bike Rally. I’m sad that I’m not riding this year but I am also worried about my friends who are. It’s not easy riding all day and sleeping outdoors in these conditions. If you can, send them some money. It’ll help.
I’m trying to get used to riding in the heat. I’m less certain about riding in the wildfire smoke.
We even have a new symbol in the weather forecasts. Okay, maybe it’s just new to me, new to here.
Thinking about new bad weather conditions reminded me of Bartholemew and the Oobleck. It’s the Dr Seuss book where the king wishes for a new kind of weather and comes to regret it.
I know, of course, that it’s worse where the fires are actually raging, often in Northern and Indigenous communities, all west of here. There are currently more than 700 wildfires, more than 200 of them out of control. People are losing their houses and being evacuated. It’s horrible.
But I don’t share the view that there’s no loss here worth grieving just because it’s worse somewhere else.
Canadian summers have a special kind of poignancy to them, because our winters can be so long, cold, and snowy. Now we’re losing both our snowy winters and the joy of the warm summer months as summers become one long period of heat alerts and wildfire air quality advisories.
I start to cry when I think about it because I know it’s just going to get worse. Next summer won’t be better, cooler, or clearer. Likely, it’s be worse, hotter and more smoky. That’s a horrible feeling, knowing that even if we do all that we can do now, the point at which climate change levels off won’t occur in my lifetime. I think it’s one of the things that makes acting so hard.
It makes me sad to move my physical activity into the gym in the summer months. I’m definitely switching some of my longer bike rides into the fall. But that’s just a teeny tiny part of the picture.
We need to move from climate grief into action collectively. It’s a feminist issue, it’s a fitness issue, it’s an all of us, and everything issue.
I don’t have an upbeat note on which to end, but here’s the photo from the dock on Saturday night.
Thank you for articulating what a lot of us are feeling– grief, worry about those in the path of greater harms and uncertainty about the future. I recently read an article about how winters in New England are getting warmer and shorter, and the lows are much higher. Also, the rate of warming is greater here than in other parts of the country. This may be /is likely echoed where you are. Yes, this is a feminist and fitness and universal issue.
As a (northern) Californian who has lived in sight of a fire’s glow, whose daughter & her family have been evacuated, who spent my working life as a fire insurance underwriter, who chairs the sustainability committee at my senior housing residence (that looks out at those dangerous hills), I so appreciate your thoughts on this frightening subject!
The more people are aware of it, the more likely they are to lose some of the complacency that has brought us here.
Meanwhile, I think a productive life often requires some joy, so I would not hesitate to love those sunsets.