radiant fracture

For weeks now I've been thinking I smelled smoke.

Since no one else seemed to notice it, I've been wondering if the smell was some sort of guilt-induced hallucination, a reminder to pay more attention to the wildfires.

I say guilt because the worst burns are in an area I know well, but have lived far away from for decades. I have lately thought much more about American politics than about great tracts of my own province being on fire, until it struck me that this, a fire in my home landscape, ought to be something that affected me; that this indifference or numbness was not a strength but a failing. I started to try to make myself think about it, and somewhere in there I began to smell smoke.

We were promised a heat wave. Instead, today the sky filled up with a deep haze -- not the dull surface of overcast, but a translucent zone, illuminated but empty, with no visible other side of blue.

This morning, as I sat at the counter with my cold coffee, I could put my hand into the patterning of orangey light and strong shadow that dropped from the window -- as I might put my fingers into a pool to see the shadows at play. I've seen this light before, I thought. Once when the sun turned red at midday, and I was spooked and entranced; and two years ago, when the wildfires were burning up-island.

(I looked up the name for the patterns of light in water and found that they are called caustics, meaning burning.)

Two years ago last month it was Pride, and the wildfires -- on the island, but not close to us -- turned the sky a dingy orange for days. It became oppressive, like the atmosphere of an alien planet. The Pride march was big and noisy, but everything felt stifled by the sky.

You may have heard that the fires are huge this year. The biggest fires are in the Interior, on the mainland, in an area called the Cariboo (not to be confused with caribou), just south of Prince George, the city where I grew up.

The full population of Williams Lake, a city of about 11,000 people three hours south of Prince George, had to be evacuated, and thousands of other people in the area.

The other day on a ramble in the park, I ran into an old university friend and some pals of his. One of the friends had been working up in Prince George. He said that most of the evacuees ended up there. It's a bigger city, and its usual population sits at about 74,000, so that's a population increase of about 15%.

The park was matted with dry golden grasses as usual for July, and looked like perfect tinder. They walked on and I sat on my rocky outcrop to sketch the trees.

There have been air quality warnings as far south as Vancouver, but none here so far that I know of. Until today, if you lived here and had no news access, you wouldn't have known anything about a fire, except for that maybe-smell maybe-hallucination.

Today the air feels dry and scratchy. The sky is not tinted, as it was in the year when the fires were closer, but the light that falls has a sunset quality. It's as though it's a different time on the ground than it is in the sky -- one o'clock of a grey afternoon up there, and late on a sunny summer evening down here, only it's evening all day long. The shadows are strong, and the dyed light turns them bright blue, like watery inkstains.

That other year I brought some articles about the wildfires and forest management into class for discussion (though I made rather a ratty job of it, I'm afraid.) This year there hasn't really been an opportunity to respond that way.

The first seventeen years of my life were given form in a place that by now has changed a great deal, what with beetle invasions and fires. My family doesn't live there any more, and any remaining friends there I've lost touch with. It isn't home, yet it's never quite not home, simply because it was the first place. This season is like a fire at the beginning of the world, or that's how I think it should feel: like a burning-out of my memory. Maybe that's the smell of smoke.

{rf}