Martian Skies (Ohlson)

When I drove to Oregon from Ohio eight years ago, I thought I was moving from one wet place to another. Both Portland and Cleveland have high levels of annual precipitation, albeit with different ratios of rain to snow. Most of my visits to my daughter in Portland had been predictably inconvenienced by rain. “It’s pissing outside,” she’d say back in her insouciant twenties, and then quickly defend her chosen home with “but that’s what makes it so green and beautiful!” So imagine how shocked I was a few hours from Portland, driving somewhere near the Columbia Gorge, to round a curve and see fire in the trees along the highway. Traffic slowed, but we all kept going, and I watched the fire recede in my rearview mirror, the flames there framed by the faces of my miserable, carsick dogs.

I learned that -- contrary to what everyone once thought -- it’s not always wet in Portland. There’s a dry period that can begin in July and might not end until October. A lot of the plants in my new garden died because I didn’t adjust to that reality. I grew up in northern California, where we were used to worrying about fire—the fathers in our neighborhood did controlled burns every summer to protect our homes against wildfire; the road to Lake Tahoe took us past a big Smoky the Bear billboard with a thermometer showing the current level of fire danger -- but I thought Portland was ever green. I didn’t understand the vulnerability of the landscape to fire until 2017, when the Eagle Creek Fire torched 50,000 acres in the Columbia Gorge and was still smoldering nearly a year later.

It was a hideous glimpse of the present, with Oregon and so much of the west coast on fire.

We wake up every morning to Martian skies. The smoke is even inside our home, even though we haven’t opened a window in days. When we go outside, we crack the doors open, slip through, and shut them tight, as if trying to prevent a cat from escaping. We managed to buy furnace filters before they sold out in every store. Two are taped to box fans to jerry-rig air cleaners, one is in the actual furnace (set to recycle air), and all three were dark with soot in two days.

When the pandemic began, our neighborhood became more lively than usual. More people were at home, and they were often out walking, keeping a careful distance from other groups and individuals, often waving in what seemed like a good-natured acceptance of this new life. At night when we’d walk the dogs, the lawns and porches were often lit with tiny parties. But Portland has had the world’s worst air quality for days now, and the sidewalks and lawns are empty. The orange sky casts a weird light on the trees and other vegetation. When I was a kid, I used to try to imagine a new color—not new, exactly, just one that existed but our eyes couldn’t see. The green-orange of the trees might be one of those colors.

Before we go to bed at night, we check both the air quality numbers -- steadily in the maroon “hazardous” zone -- and the state of the actual fires, which have already burned a million Oregon acres. There’s a fire twenty miles away from my Portland neighborhood, and the next county is under evacuation orders. Despite the assurances of various websites, I can’t help but wonder if the fire will sweep in while we sleep, leaving our charred forms behind like the equally hapless citizens of Pompeii. Our hearts pound when we hear someone operating power tools outside -- there is a crew down the block cutting down a tree and there was a guy blowing leaves at the church -- because we’re afraid they’ll spark a new fire.

And we in Portland hardly have the worst of it. There are all those parts of Oregon where people have to move so quickly to save themselves and their loved ones and a few loved things that they don’t have time for fear. Whole towns snuffed. Forests gone. People disappeared. I have been emailing with a fabulous organic winemaker, whom I interviewed for an article about seven years ago and the New York Times profiled last year, about finally coming to visit her in person. She was just beginning harvest. But some of the worst fires are raging not far from her, and I have no idea if she’s safe. An urban farmer from whom I buy vegetables sent out his weekly notice -- then called it back because he had to go help his son, who farms just outside the city. They saved his farm animals, but all the farm buildings including his house are gone.

And the firefighters themselves! They're worn out, and there aren't enough of them. Our governor asked other states for help, saying she needed ten teams. At first, only Utah sent a team. Since then, volunteers from Minnesota, Nevada, and Mexico have either arrived or are on their way. A few days ago, the governor announced that cooler and wetter weather is coming, weather that makes it easier for them to put out the fires. But I’m hideously transfixed by the little lightning bolt on my phone’s weather app, indicating that a thunderstorm may be on its way. Storms like that sometimes start more fires than they put out. I keep reading about Oregon’s beautiful places which have burned, both human-made and nature-made places. I haven’t seen most of them. I’m afraid the state will burn down before I learn to love it.

But yesterday evening when we were out walking the dogs, I looked up and saw clouds surrounded by an almost bluish gray, instead of a solid orange sky. “Clouds,” I shouted to my partner and texted my friends. We shouted and pointed to anyone we encountered along the walk and still feel hopeful, even though the clouds were gone by the time we got home.

Kristin Ohlson is the author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet. Based in Portland, Oregon, she has published articles in the New York Times, Discover, Gourmet, and others. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing.