Things were starting to feel normal – we were finally acclimated to our pandemic lives. We took walks on our suburban streets without the paranoia of others on our paths threatening our health, met friends in our backyards for socially distanced gatherings, set out for long drives to the ocean to breathe in crisp air and marvel at the sight of brown pelicans swiftly dive into the water’s wavy surface. The tabs on our phones monitored the daily Covid death toll, the BLM protests, the mishandling of everything under the sun by an incompetent president, but we also browsed the internet for cheap loungewear and scrolled through Instagram. We tried to decide between phone banking or text banking or post card writing. Surrendered to the uncertainty of Covid, we were less scared, less inconvenienced, less melancholic. Certainly, we were not suffering.

Then suddenly one night, out of the blue – as they say, thousands of lightning bolts set the sky ablaze, mining the landscape all around us. Stunned, we marveled at the awesome, lit up glory above us. We took hundreds of photographs of the sky, trying to capture its miraculous beauty, the bright bolts spreading into the darkness like enormous skeletal veins. Yet, somewhere deep within us, on an elemental level, we were certain the vision before us was a bad omen. We knew our land well. It was dry. The fire season was upon us.

Multiple major wild fires in California, the newspaper articles read the next day above photographs of forests ablaze with black smoke blooming out of treetops. Immediately, we checked the locations of the fires and saw that our suburban neighborhoods were stuck in a misshapen parenthesis. To our West was the arc of the ocean, to our North, East, and South – the fires.

As seasoned Californians, we were familiar with wildfires, which, in previous years, had caused school and library closures, public pool shut downs. We remembered the smoke smell permeating everything, even our clothes, and the haze tricking our minds into mistaking it for fog. Naively, we expected all of this again, not knowing our past experience was only a mild version of what was to come.

Soon, the smoke arrived with its familiar faint smell, like that of a campfire contained safely in a man-made pit. Reflexively, we checked the AQI. 50. Moderate. Not bad, we thought.

A day later, on the first day of “back to school” for our children, the day we already feared would be the beginning of another disastrous distance learning experience, we woke up to the acrid odor of smoke that had, overnight, crept inside our homes. The AQI was over 100. Unhealthy for sensitive individuals. Outside, a yellow haze coated everything in sight, reducing visibility so low that the trees down the street appeared like fuzzy feathers.

Our minds flashed back to the memories of last year, or the one before that, when entire neighborhoods in our state was burnt to ash, when whole towns were left without power, when our friends were forced to evacuate their homes. We, too, had been inconvenienced back then, having to embrace the unpredictability of the fire season the way we embraced the uncertainty of Covid now. We had stayed indoors to avoid breathing in the toxic air just as we strictly stayed home in the first few weeks of the pandemic. The realization of all the loss, the upheaval, the destruction happening again, this time in a pandemic, struck our bodies with grief, unsettling us slowly. Yet, we were also determined to not traumatize our children any more than they already had been this year. So we did what we were good at doing: we reminded ourselves that we were lucky to be far enough from the fires. We had experience. We had air purifiers and board games and Netflix.

Thus began the two weeks of relentless monitoring the AQI numbers first thing in the morning, when our bodies were still sleepy, our limbs weightless in our warm beds. We oscillated between opening and shutting the windows depending on the numbers, which frantically went down to the 50s and spiked up to the 100s. Moderate. Unhealthy. Moderate. Unhealthy. Moderate. Unhealthy. Again, the malevolent smell – the chemical, woodsy odor that repels one when one experiences it too many days in a row, became a constant in our lives. Determined to keep things normal, we restlessly checked the AQI apps, and went outside for brief walks as soon as the numbers lowered down to moderate. We held steady and waited up to an hour before a previously scheduled backyard gathering to cancel it. Although the temperatures were stifling, the AQI sometimes improved. It was better to be hot and outside and with friends than to be hot and stuck inside and alone. We managed to make it out to the ocean to cool down. Once. All the while, the smoke persisted, like an ominous whisper. I’m coming after you, we imagined it saying. I’m looming around.

No one expected what happened next.

On September 9, we woke up in confusion at the odd darkness of our rooms despite our clocks saying we had, most certainly, overslept. The open slats of the blinds revealed an eerie glow outside. The world outside was dark, orange, and seething in anger.  Our brains couldn’t comprehend what we saw, for we had a child-like disbelief at this awful, yet thrilling new reality.

            Look at the sky, we whispered as we shook our partner’s shoulders, jolting them out of sleep.

            Mommy, our bewildered children shouted soon, when they barged into our rooms, the outside is different!

It was impossible to suppress our urge to explore this sudden new world. Dazed and timid, we tiptoed out of our homes and dubiously walked up and down our streets, taking photographs of the devilish orange glow, the blackish roads, the brownish leaves. Everything covered in gritty ash.

 

            It’s orange, we texted to our friends and families in other states.

            Our cars, our streets, our shoes are coated in ash.

            There are large ash particles in the pool.

            It feels like living in a dark orange light box.

            It is like living on Mars.

            It is like living in sunglasses. Permanently.

            It is not like anything we have ever seen.

            It is the apocalypse. 

 

Our confusion was primal, like that of a lost dog circling around, wagging its tail, its eyes searching. Only, we circled in and out of our houses, looked up at the sky and took photographs of what we saw to confirm that we were not, in fact, imagining it. The orange glow.

Here is the street.

            Here are the trees.

            Here is the lamp post dusted with ash.

             10:30 in the morning, the street lights were on. The interior lights at the coffee shop were on. The fairy lights on the trees in the darkened downtown were on. The sun was nowhere to be seen. There was only the glow. We were stuck in a dusk without a light source in the orange belly of the devil. We ran our fingers through the ash and examined the thick layers of it clinging to our skin. Wasn’t all this, just the week before, a part of something alive, something vital? What was now ash – dead, black and gritty, was once the tender belly of a sly coyote, the wooden shutters of someone’s house, the coarse fur of a dainty deer. All this suffering flaking down on us like snowflakes in one of those perfectly round snow globes.

The street lights stayed on through noon, through the afternoon, and through the early evening, too. Each minute, we sank further into darker disbelief.

By the time evening arrived, we no longer remembered what a clear day was supposed to look like. We swiped through our phones for pictures of normal days, but the brightness made our eyes ache. Finally, the day ended, and the night was dark the way it is supposed to be. This felt normal and good.

The following week was a blur. Each morning after the Orange Day, we rolled out of our beds, our heads groggy, our sinuses in full attack, our throats dry and gritty. Briefly, we wondered if we finally contracted Covid, but the thought vanished quickly the way clouds had vanished that week, due to smoke. For a few more days, the sun stayed out of sight, the sky nothing but a luminous haze. The AQI swung from unhealthy to very unhealthy. We turned up the air purifier dials further, their constant, low hum another new normal in our days. We ordered some toys for our children to keep them entertained at home. We are used to sheltering in place, we agonized, we’ve got this.

Endless hours saturated with plume particles. Toxic air poisoning our lungs. With each infinitely long day, the colors that swallowed us changed, cascading from red to orange to yellow to light gray. We crawled through time. Some days later, the small, trepid dot of the sun became visible behind the smoky veil.  We smiled in greeting.

Haze. Haze. Haze. We kept obsessively monitoring the API, but the numbers barely changed. Initially, they went up and only up. Very unhealthy. Very unhealthy. Very unhealthy. When they did briefly go down, a transient hope rippled through our bodies, but the numbers went back up again. We descended further into the deep well of hopelessness. We didn’t mean to be tragic, but this was a tragedy, wasn’t it? Our forests were burning. The planet was hot. We were suffocating. Were we finally suffering?

First, it was the pandemic. Then, distance learning. Remote work. Our homes closing in on us, the rooms felling smaller and smaller still. A series of multipole crises, colliding. Toxic matter choking our sky, poisoning us. Every night, we fell asleep in sorrow. Every morning, we woke up in sorrow. We did not go for walks. We did not see friends. We stopped texting everyone. We resorted to doing online exercise classes, because we needed the endorphins to get through the days, because we had children, because we owed this to them.

Finally, it all became too much to bear. We couldn’t tolerate being stuck indoors anymore – we had cabin fever. We had already done every craft we could possibly think of with our children, offered them endless hours of screen time, mediated hundreds of fights. The urge to get out of the house became a persistent itch. We needed a walk like we needed air, so we decided to mask up and go outside, where we no longer smelled the smoke even though it was, most certainly, everywhere. Had we finally become one with it? We checked the AQI again, just to be sure, but the numbers needled between 170 and 190. Very unhealthy. Holding onto hope felt like trying to hold hot coals. We despaired.

 

 

Then, one morning, perhaps because the smoke was tired of hovering over us ordinary people, perhaps because the ash was bored with our neighborhood and wanted to coat some other landscape, or perhaps because of a miraculous off shore storm that caused a breeze, it finally happened. The AQI dropped down to 100, unhealthy for sensitive individuals.Then to below 50. Healthy. The sky cleared up and turned blue again. The haze vanished.

Tremors of happiness in the pit of our stomachs! We barged out of our homes to go outside. Outside! We eagerly breathed in the luxurious, crisp air, took our children on bike rides, played with them at the park.  The whole neighborhood was spilled out of their homes into the streets. This is our community, we thought as our masked faces turned towards each other in greeting, our narrowed eyes smiling in acknowledgment of the impossibility of what we endured.  We did it. We lived through the worst.

 

We wanted to believe this would last forever, even though we knew it wouldn’t. The AQI still read in the 300s around the fires that circled us. Dread piled in our bodies, but willfully, we pushed it away. We wanted so desperately to go back to our pandemic normal. For the moment, we enjoyed the clean air.

Clear skies again the next day. And the one after that.

Oddly, the next day, we received texts with photographs of the sky from our families who lived in the Midwest and the East Coast. In the pictures, an orange sun with diminished edges glowed behind a yellow haze. We recognized this to be our sun, but we were mistaken. It was a picture of their sun, the sun, the whole damn planet’s only sun, looking just the way it did when smoke was slowly clearing up from our sky, finally making it visible.

The wildfire smoke that had transformed our days into a hazy hell had travelled thousands of miles and reached other states far from us. Astonished, we stood still. We stared at the pictures. The small dot of a sun behind unmistakable smog.

It dawned on us then. The wildfires were like Covid. They were going after everyone.

Neval Pektas is a Kurdish-American writer originally from Turkey. Her writing explores Kurdish and Muslim identities and how these identities may overlap each other. Neval’s work has appeared in the Washington Post and Masque and Spectacle. She is currently working on her first novel.