By Amanda Knox

Having been born, grown up, and lived in Seattle for the majority of my life, I am both familiar and comfortable with a cloudy sky. Where transplants from sunnier states can find the rain oppressive and are disconcerted by the enduring swathes of dull to bright grey blanketing the sky, I am comforted by the introspective mists and the silver depths of the clouds rising above. I can breathe.

Last Sunday was different. Last Sunday was something I do not remember seeing in all my twenty-eight years. It was a weird, dry, harsh, cough-inducing haze—like fog, but the opposite of fog.

“It’s really L.A. out right now,” Colin observed in the car on our way home from running errands.
“What do you mean?” I asked, squinting.
“I mean, the weather, it reminds me of Southern California.”
“All the weird dust in the air?”
“That’s smoke, babe.”

My heart clenched, probably in the same instinctual way that a field mouse’s heart clenches when it senses the same thing: smoke. Fire.

Reality check. Wildfires are, actually, a necessary function of a healthy ecosystem. In a forest, fire recycles the build-up of flammable brush and debri competing for nutrients in the soil into fertilizer for the surviving species. Like with floods, windstorms, and landslides, healthy ecosystems evolved to exploit and depend upon wildfire. The fields and forests east of our Cascades are no different.

What is different is that this is the second year in a row that Washington State has seen record-breaking wildfire “complexes.” According to the NWCC*, this year’s Okanogan Complex consists of five wildfires collectively burning through 292,512 (and counting) acres in North-Central Washington.

Over the weekend, winds from the East brought the vast quantities of smoke from these record-breaking wildfires over the mountains to settle over Western Washington, resulting in the unfamiliar haze and less-than-healthy air conditions. To this Seattleite, the dry side of the Cascades never seemed so close, and so encroaching.

As the work-week opened, winds from the Southwest pushed that smoke back easterly where it came from. Even as we breathe easier over here, the smothering smoke keeps firefighting efforts grounded over there, and those winds from the Southwest are expected to feed the flames. Better would be if the forecast for thundershowers turned up more rain and less lightning.

In the meantime, according to King 5, Okanogan Complex incident commander Todd Pechota confirmed, “This fire remains the No. 1 priority fire in the United States.”

And we are not alone. This year lays claim to one of the worst fire seasons in recent history nationwide. According to the NIFC**, 7,697,292 (and counting) collective acres have burned already this year. This is almost three times the acreage that burned by this time last year.

Back in May, Washington Governor Jay Inslee declared*** a statewide drought, citing record-low snowpack, falling river levels, rising temperatures, and warned of the wildfires that were to come. Because our rain-based reservoirs have protected us against suffering water shortages at home, like perhaps one or two fellow Seattleites, I only really took notice when the warm winter devalued my season pass for the mountains.

In terms of real human cost, the entire Okanogan county is under general fire evacuation order and over a thousand residents have so far been displaced. According to NWCC, 5,140 residences are directly threatened by the fires and ninety-four have been confirmed destroyed. Sixty-three other kinds of structures have been reported destroyed. Four firefighters have been injured, including one in critical condition, and three have lost their lives.

This side of the mountains, the smoke settled and unsettled me. A creature of the rain, I’m out of my element, and I wonder if we of the Pacific Northwest are on a course to be displaced of the very nature of our home. Comparatively safe as I may be, the fire is too close for comfort.

*Northwest Coordination Center. http://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/fire_info#WA-NES-001209

**National Interagency Fire Center. http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm

***Natasha Geiling. ThinkProgess. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/18/3659911/washington-drought-…