I.
From the front porch of our rented house in the Missoula valley, onto which we recently dragged our sun-faded (dusty blue) leather couch, where I sit on summer mornings to drink coffee before the temperatures climb too high, I can see a few of the hills and mountains at the edge of town, layered by distance in a plait of dissolving color, and it is to this plait I now look, these recent mornings, to determine whether or not the air that day will be fit to breathe.
II.
“All my thoughts are climate change thoughts,” I write to my friend in Boise, who is on the other side of a complex of fires on the Idaho-Montana border from me. I hate it so much, he answers immediately, and there’s nothing left for me to say. “All my thoughts are climate change thoughts,” I admit to my friend who has recently been asked by her landlords to move out, which is to say she has been evicted; I am buying her iced coffee before she moves her pets and all her belongings to her next apartment, and so this statement is made to excuse the fact that, in this haze, I can think of almost nothing to say to calm her, or reassure her, or make her laugh. “All my thoughts are climate change thoughts,” I text to my friend who recently sold her house in Missoula (for an amount of money that she is embarrassed to disclose to me) so that she and her partner can find a place to live in the United States that isn’t obscured by summer smoke or winter clouds. She admits she does not know where this place will be. “All my thoughts are climate change thoughts,” I think to myself, a lil sorrowfully, as I sit down to my pottery wheel (though I don’t feel like working at all) because I think I used to think about interesting, sensuous, vivid things.
III.
There is a feature on the Weather app of my phone called the “Breezometer,” which uses satellite data to map the air quality index of a given region in real time. In “Breezometer” terms, Blue and Green represent pure, clean air, the placid amoebic representations of which hover (for now) over the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest and most of the Eastern half of the country. Yellow and Orange represent climbing particulates, approaching danger — “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” my phone specifies, which registers in my mind as kind of a joke. The Red parts, as you might imagine, are unsafe; on the map, there’s a big Red oval hovering over the Missoula valley, a former glacial lake bed rimmed by modest mountains, where all manner of sky phenomena gather (are trapped) until a strong wind blows them elsewhere. Even worse than Red is Dark Red, approaching Burgundy or Purple, and these spots represent the concentrated badness of the fires themselves. To the West and South and also Northeast of the city I live in, dark splotches of toxic air Purple the map like blood.
IV.
A former employer messages me on Instagram to say that she’s interested in getting some kind of land-share going, that we should talk more about going in on property together. Climate models, she says, basically show that Maine and Vermont are going to be the best places to live—east of fires, north of drought—and that we should look there. I think of the entire population of New York City emptying out into the woods. Another guy interviewed by Forbes Magazine says that the Great Lakes region is the best bet, actually, because it doesn’t get wildfires or hurricanes and it’s got “an unlimited supply of fresh water.” A woman I used to wait tables with recently bought a house in Las Vegas because it is still miraculously, eerily cheap to live there, and to her way of thinking she’ll at least own the roof over her head when everything starts to go to shit. My friend who recently sold her house here in town, who had been leaning toward northern New Mexico as their new landing spot, sends a text update on the 10th straight day of smoke in the valley: “I think we are officially done with the West.”
V.
To Google “how to prepare for climate change” is to confront a series of articles in which authors make general appeals for humanity to reduce our [?] emissions or (redundantly) to realize that climate change is here. Or it is to confront a range of climate-optimistic essays that cite the amount of work being done to further climate research, or the sheer number of supporters of the Green New Deal, as evidence to suggest that climate catastrophe can be slowed, halted, or even reversed. There is some insinuation that to believe we might actually be unable to prevent catastrophe at all is nihilistic, is part of the problem, is giving up. But it seems like no article wants to come right out and say it: that we missed the big window, that we keep missing a series of smaller windows, and in the absence of anyone in power who wants to take responsibility for the dip in the stock market that serious climate action would necessitate, all that remains are inadequate approximations of helpfulness being doled out by machines. The first result my search query returns, for instance, is a civic webpage for the town of Bradford, England, which suggests the following actions to “Prepare yourself for extreme weather:”
In a heat wave wear sun screen and a hat and drink plenty of water.
Snowfall and icy weather can make people more prone to falls so take care.
Weather can affect transport networks, making it difficult to get around.
VI.
I’m tired from thinking these thoughts, and tired from working clay into objects, and tired especially from living and driving and breathing in the smoky valley, beneath the planes that do not stop taking off and landing despite the color of the air. My head aches from the haze, which gives the horizon (world) both a season-less-ness and also a too-dry concentrated Late Summer feeling, and the resulting mixture of disorientation and nostalgia-for-something-good-nearly-over makes me want to cry. The ambient temperature in the house is about 85 degrees, but I fill up the tub with hot bath water, pour salts in, and slip inside it to pantomime some relief. As soon as I sit, the sky booms and cracks with afternoon thunder and, miraculously, it starts to rain. Fat drops beget streams that river out from the gutters out the window. It comes down harder, even, and I think of the trees and plants and soil drinking deeply, the crust cooling even a few degrees. I watch for a while from the bathroom window, trying to relax in the warm water. I think, now, that if we are going to survive at all, it will only be because the earth had the patience to wait for us to learn to read her signs.