Missing Sky

The world is burning.

As we make our annual summer trip to the lake, this reality becomes impossible to ignore. Past fields and through mountain passes, along river valleys and forests, orchards, scrublands, and vineyards, the lone constant is the smoke. It’s not just an atmospheric quirk of west coast jet streams — the smoke is everywhere and it gets thicker the further inland we go. Everything awash in shades of grey and orange. The foreground, dark shadows of tree and brush, the middle ground, a foggy, indistinguishable mass, the horizon, smoke-eaten. The ruddy, Martian light makes all the streams shimmer like burnished copper. The sun is rendered hypothetical behind the ochre haze.

Gas stations are handing out painter’s masks and by the time our week at the lake is done, we have seen handfuls of people wandering the streets wearing them at all hours of the day. It is ominous and strange at first, then ominous and strangely normal. It is the summer town we know so well, and yet it isn’t that same town, not at all. Are we out of time to fix all this? was the lingering thought I couldn’t shake all week.

Summers at the lake are measured in the length of late afternoon shadows and the size of this year’s flip flops, and in terms of where, precisely, the shallow end of the pool laps at my children’s bodies: ears, neck, chest, waist. We measure the summer in other ways too…