What It Feels Like to Live in “Satan’s Ashtray” During Smoke Season

A history of my adaptation to the Pacific Northwest’s grim new weather caused by climate change

A red sun during smoke season in the Pacific Northwest; photo by Aaaron M Brown

We never used to have a smoke season. I was raised in the Inland Northwest and I can think of only a handful of times when the smoke clung in the air over the Mid-Columbia Valley where I grew up. In those cases, you could always pinpoint the source. The Horse Heaven Hills, just south of town, occasionally caught fire and burned clear, roughly ovoid patches on the normally brown-gold hillside.

Upon landing in the Pasco, Washington airport in 2017, the smoke was oppressive and sourceless. It was the first year of the smoke season. Fires in British Columbia were on their way to burning over three million acres of timber. They would blanket the entire Northwest corner of the North American continent in smoke for weeks.

My mother had had a stroke in early August, a month into the fires. She was recovering in a dreary in-patient rehab facility on the outskirts of Pasco. I remember standing outside in the hot, late-summer evening and watching the sun set behind the hills. It was blood red like the clot that had lodged in her brain. The whole desert smelled like Satan’s ashtray.

Exhausted and bereft, I remember thinking that the end of the world was more boring and depressing than I’d expected.

The next year, the fires were closer. Late snowpack and dry conditions meant that fires sprang up seemingly from nowhere. Washington State burned off and on all summer, the smoke swelling and receding like a chaotic tide. It lasted longer than one could reasonably stay inside for. Twenty-four days that summer had air quality bad enough that staying inside was recommended, at least for “sensitive groups”. “Sensitive groups” wasn’t defined anywhere, but being out in it day after day, it felt like merely having lungs put one in a “sensitive group.”

I bought masks, two years before COVID would make them compulsory. I came to find out later that all of my smoke masks were useless for COVID since they had filtered valves on them. I now have to stock two different kinds of masks for different threats to my health.

After the first few days my sinuses were inflamed and the back of my throat constantly itched. For an entire month I felt just on the verge of getting sick. It took a toll on my sleep and the constant irritation made me grouchy with friends and loved ones. I got cabin fever from staying shut up in my apartment. I only left to go to work or to get groceries. The small air filter I’d acquired wasn’t enough to keep the inside of my apartment from smelling faintly of smoke. Eventually the rains came and beat the smoke back down into the soil. My throat cleared up a few days later.

I don’t have any clear memories of smoke season the next few years. Between the pandemic keeping us indoors in 2020 and 2021, and the normal variations of the season, they don’t stand out in my memory. In the same way that some autumns or springs fix in my memory for the particular glory of their weather, some smoke seasons seem to stick in my mind (or, perhaps my lungs) with more clarity than others.

By 2023, my mother was living in her hometown of Spokane. I was making the commute out to help her from my job in Seattle when I could. Smoke season came closer to home that year. The Gray Fire, started by sparks from power lines, ripped through the small town of Medical Lake, Washington, destroying a large portion of it. They closed the highway.

For the first time in my life, I nervously checked my phone for evacuation orders. I didn’t have a car. I worried about fleeing on foot and made lists of what I would bring with me. I decided that, if it came to it, I would walk toward downtown with just a backpack full of journals, a laptop, and important documents. I agonized over the potential loss of the beautiful impressionist painting that my partner had gotten me for Christmas the year before. Fortunately, the fire never got close enough to risk coming down into the valley in which Spokane sits.

Spokane’s geography means that air sometimes gets trapped in the river valley. It produces beautiful fogs at times. Now it meant that I could smell the faint scent of smoke for days on end, even after the air looked clear. I squinted at the sunset every evening, trying to ascertain how much redder than normal it was, as if it were some primordial air quality meter.

Climate is inconsistent, even if its current arc is clear. We had a bit of a reprieve last year. When L.A. burned this winter, I reached out to friends in the area. One friend’s parents are safe, but a neighborhood she loved disappeared in flames. Another was woken up in the middle of the night by his phone telling him to evacuate immediately and then, a few minutes later, that it was a false alarm.

Climate change means paying the cost of anxieties large and small, even when your part of the world is not literally on fire.

A few weeks ago, I was drinking with some friends in North Seattle. It was a Friday night after an uncommonly cold and clear week. Normally the winter gloom, affectionately known as the Big Dark, settles in around mid-October and sticks around, like a bad house guest, until late spring. Combined with the short daylight hours, it can make winters around here beleaguering.

The unseasonable bright days, then, were a small relief. One of my friends mentioned that, apparently, more winters in the future would be like this. Brighter, colder, dryer. The snowpack in the mountains, key for greening the area as it melts in the spring and early summer, is about two thirds of what it normally is this time of year. Even our brighter winters contribute to smoke season, it seems.

In their book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow catalog some of the diverse ways people used to live in prehistory. One thing that struck me reading the book, which included accounts of people who lived in the Seattle area before Europeans arrived on the continent, was how adaptable they were and how much they changed to fit their environments. Cultures lived radically different lives from season to season, in some cases. As their climate changed, they moved up river valleys, or moved from tending and cultivating pre-existing wild patches of plants to full-on slash-and-burn agriculture.

I don’t think we’ll get that luxury. Barring the occasional volcanic eruption, our prehistoric ancestors never had to deal with a year that suddenly had a fifth, inclement season in it. Their climate changed only slowly, giving generations of people the time to learn and adapt.

For us, we pretty much have time to buy some masks, hope they’re the right ones, and text our friends to see if they need a place to crash for a while.

Until one day, our phone goes off in the middle of the night with an evacuation order that isn’t a bureaucratic mistake, and as we hustle through the glowing dark, we’re the ones being checked in on by friends smelling the smoke hundreds of miles away.

Aaron M Brown is a writer and hacker living in the Pacific Northwest. His hacking has been featured at DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth. His writing is available online at his blog and newsletter.