Smoke On The Water

In summer, I try to get up into alpine lakes for a swim and some elevation enjoyment. High in the Central Cascades, I travel back in time, finding flowers freshly in bloom, even though, thousands of feet below in the rive valleys of my home, blossoms fell to fruit long ago, and vivid color has flushed to brown in a snag of tangled bramble and wilted grasses. Up in the highlands, I seek refreshing cold waters and young mountain growth. But on this day, the signs of summer fire season cloaked my beloved retreat in lurking haze. Wildfire smoke from the east side of the mountains, was at last, descending onto the western foothills to choke out the sun and stifle breath in all who dwell here. We had been warned of the coming conundrum in air quality the weekend before, and I thought, on a blissful note, that I could beat the heat and smog a few days before the neighboring chaotic brimstone hurled plumes my way.

From the onset of my drive upward, I could see the stark difference in hazy atmosphere, but naively thought I could still stay below the rings of particle ash for just a few more hours, to get a swim in. Denial is not a river in Egypt. As I began my climb on foot, after driving, I began inhaling the taste of burning. Delving upward in my pursuit of summer respite, the air grew thick, making each breath a task for my lungs. More than half way to my aquatic aim, my head began to throb in a pinpoint of pain on my right temple. I realized, my throat had partially closed, trying to keep out the polluted atmosphere. For health and safety reasons, I turned back to the truck, just below the coming soot clouds. This friends, is a key point of survival training- knowing when to turn back, before trials and tribulations abound. To have continued, assuming I would safely be able to snorkel in freezing cold water with bad air, would have been a fools errand. Recognize impending hazards before you step into them folks. Hold to safe standards of conduct in the back country, and you will live to experience them another day.

Dropping back down in elevation, the haze had not yet descended into the foothills, and it made sense to seek greener pastures- to borrow another colloquial phrase. While I was unable to enjoy a swim on this day, I did get to witness the arrival of what would become a week of clogged lung capacity for all in The Puget Lowlands. Smoke without fire might be difficult to fully comprehend for those not versed in wildfire smoke and pressure systems over mountain ranges, or western fire seasons. Smoke can visit from opposite sides of the state when burning, sometimes blowing down from Canada, sometimes up from Oregon. There are years without this detriment to our health, and others where only one or two days of minor inconvenience might be felt. This year, 2026, is becoming one of the worst. Not just in smoke on the waters of The Puget Sound, but burned acres throughout The State of Washington.

There are two pressing matters causing this rampant inferno- one being a five year drought, the other being fire suppression for the sake of human settlement sprawl. Though I must also mention a specific incident in Spokane this year as an exception- in this case, a mentally ill arsonist set edges of our second largest city ablaze, causing the destruction of many homes and neighborhoods in a more densely populated area. This adds to the smoke pollution crawling into our airspace now, and should be noted as particularly insidious to our future health and happiness. Please mark the harm of deeply breathing in particulates in most cases, regardless of what’s being burned, but wood smoke is far less damaging, compared to breathing in burning plastics, fiberglass insulation, or silica dust.

What did bring sanity to my plight in the mountains, was a presence of moisture on the landscape where I hiked. These altitudes were still cool and condensing water. The morning dew lay heavy on the brush as I swept through. My skin was wet with mountain mists, a reminder that I was still in a rainforest, no matter the season. Here water still held sway, and I was thankful for refreshing lushness in the onset of ash and smoke.

The humidity of this region might stave off fire for the near future, but it’s only skin deep. Below, in the hill country and river valleys of my farm and home, the land is parched, without highland mists or heavy dew to quench dusty soil and wilted edges of forest understory. Again, the bright mountain meadows of wildflowers were in full bloom, confusing the mind as smoke crept closer, spilling in over the peaks, marring the green acres of forest and flowers all around. I came upon seeps in rocky ledges, and mountain lakes still brimming with bright waters. There is a buffer of abundant liquid paradise, but it does not extend down into our valleys below. This is the unnerving truth in our region today- we are vulnerable to fire, more now than ever. Thank goodness for irrigation, strong aquifers, and mountain streams that feed anemic rivers far below.

The creek which still creeps along at Leafhopper Farm remains year-round, but each summer of this drought, the flow grows slower and slower. I can see this salmon bearing waterway, turning to seasonal flow in the next few decades. If so, it will loose its salmon, the sculpins, freshwater mussels, and other aquatic beings that rely on moving fresh water to survive. The loss of our stream will also signal a severe drop in our water-table, and depletion of one of the most unadulterated aquifers in our country. With the onset of an El Niño year, heat will continue to dominate the globe, and earth’s temperatures in the northern hemisphere have not disappointed. Keep holding onto climate science reminding us that these environmental concerns will continue exponentially.

With this in mind, how do we remain calm and enjoy life? Well, it’s still functioning all around us, through we may be spending less time in nature than is good for us, it remains steadfast, even with burning, smoke, and the heat at large. During my ascent into the mountains, I observed a lot of animal scat, calling cards of active wildlife all around. Form bobcat to coyote, bear to mountain lion, the hills are alive and abundant with many other living creatures that must endure and survive through the same environmental changes we encounter today. Nature has always been a champion of adaptation, and those who fall behind, go extinct. This alone could be the motivational speech we’re all seeking in a chaotic modern world. Just leave tech out of it, for Mother Nature is not in favor of binary control or artificial intelligence.

If we could remember computers are a binary system- 1s and 0s- open or closed ports of communication, with no middle ground, we could better understand the catastrophic limitations of our own invention, and instead, mimic and desire the rhythms of seasonal change and wildness still adapting all around. Diversity always wins in the end, and mother nature is very much a team player, when the contestants are operating within her finite limitations. Even computers have to have a plug in to remain functioning. Unplug and walk away while you can- when you can- says the lady typing away on this screen. ;) Also, there are some critical good ways AI can help humanity in our evolution- mostly in medical breakthroughs and complex maths- but I really can’t speak too much to this in my capacity as a naturalist, still I am not a Luddite, just a concerned citizen seeing US squander so much of our finite resources for entertainment. Enough on that!

By the time I was below the fray, much of the valley below was filling up with gray mist, not the kind welcome in off ocean shore breezes, but from the east, where fire continues to consume the landscape, offering some quenching of overgrown mismanagement, a landscape fractured by industry many moons ago. Fire is an integral part of ecology, both on the east and west sides of our Cascade Range, but the logging, draining wetlands for agriculture, and building of infrastructure dictates change in the environment that makes her much more brittle in the face of climate change. Ecological recovery is stymied by greed and coveting. Ownership wins out over stewardship- yet more words that do not quite grasp the very complex nature of our planet. Evolution has been in action for millions of years on this earth, yet our own presences could be dictated in the blink of an eye, but our hubris, egged on by megalomania in the form of some patriarchal god head, elects, no, dictates that the human race has some kind of control over nature and her advances.

In the short sightedness of our short “reign” on this finite planetary miracle of habitat through fanatical abuse, we miss the concept that this planet could easily maintain and host our most radical tendencies if we would only respect her. Now we have woven the noose of our own destruction and squandered the very paradise alluded to in that prominent religious texts so many love to quote at others. The first task of man, after his mythical creation story, was to be a steward of something much greater than himself. I say himself, because in these texts- there is little space for women or their own anatomy, another binary blind spot in the development of modern mankind- person-kind. I am a product of said western thinking, and I apologize for my own short comings in this race to the bottom.

Yet the texture and form of life is still compellingly present. Even the bones of a once great forest my meager mind will never fully comprehend, holds my thought and body captive. A western red cedar stump supports me as I brace myself in the presence of what once was. By a fast flowing stream in the mountains, below the smoke that cometh, there is still peace and tranquility to be found. I am always looking for connection, as a social being, in a social world, even nature repeats herself in patterns, and I can find my place within such equations at every turn. Though my ancestry remains responsible for so much destruction, I have found a personal path of redemption, or at least, condolences for the past wrongs committed, which brought me into the world and keep me here today. The elements remain a constant, fire cleansing, water purifying, earth reviving, and air refreshing time. Am I getting too abstract? Perhaps it is a way to sort the complex layers we all reside in. By boiling things down to simple elementals, recognizing that any one of them could take life in the same way they give it.

I can see why eastern philosophy is so popular on The West Coast. Though I am not looking for divination in the stumps of life, I do appreciate wisdom, experience, and observation put down for future generations to ponder and turn over in new minds with their own unique experiences. Questing for that individualism remains a strong part of our Western thinking, and it sparked revolution in the social order at one time, and might again, if we could be brave once more. I think many people are struggling to rise above the smoky haze of war, industrial exploitation, and general malaise due to our addiction of prosperity in the face of immanent ecological and societal collapse. Or, as one friend put it- I could be screaming at the clouds. Though that’s a reference to a meme for most of us young folks, it has its roots in many ancient philosophical thoughts. From ancient Greek play-write Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Japenes Zen priest Ikkyū’s poetry, the idea of trying to fit the world into black and white thinking is like yelling at clouds to create effective change on one’s life. Again, male interpretations on branching out and transcending.

I’m not intending to make this writing into a male bashing exercise, for that might slip right into screaming at clouds. I’ll admit I find myself doing that a lot these days, and would like to transcend in my own way through this ancestral trauma, with a little enlightenment of my own. As I drove down out of the clouds, where I had been screaming in my own way, my eye caught something else in the sky, not the smoke, not a cloud of any kind, but a bird, a hawk, circling ever upward, rising above all my concerns and screaming its own message to the world. I took heed of this lesson, and, paired with the song by Mdou Moctar, “Tchinta” (“What is it?”) from his recent album “Funeral for Justice”, I took in the scene with serenity, sharing it with you below.

I am far from being Sudanese, a speaker of Arabic, or even a capable musician, but somehow, I knew the song, along with the bird soaring up, were two parts of a whole. In delving deeper into the emotions this experience brought to my attention, I was not surprised to discover layers of rich meaning, from my own quest to soar above the minor obstacles in life, appreciating place and the present with more intention, to the power of thought- especially localized thinking. In searching for a translation of this song and its title, I came across the Sanskrit word “chinta” (mentation). Thus, the gift of my own thoughts gathered, not unlike clouds in the sky- fleeting; for once the hawk glides out of site, the moment of growth evolves, and another starts. could this be enlightenment? Fleeting, yet ever present in the thought that can return, on the wing, like a song, stuck there in our head for hours, then gone again, obfuscated by our own distractions, like smoke on the water.

Where do you experience your own enlightenment? When does your hawk soar? How can I keep the freedom of flight in my thoughts through the struggle with emotions, trauma, and back around again to laughter and light? Perhaps in keeping with nature, her offerings of lived experience, beyond the constraints of modernity, a timeless passion for thought, word, and deed. This writing started as a report on air quality, and morphed into philosophy and enlightenment. Though I often struggle with the failures of humanity, I am no less encouraged by the human mind and its creativity. Gratitude for the birds, water, fire, earth, sky, flight of imagination, access to wilderness, wildness within self, people who are willing to read, write, compose, and share individual thinking, and curiosity and space to continue my own pursuit of happiness. Let us truly be lived by it while we can.