You Can Taste the Air in Fire Country

I am writing this from just outside Denver, an hour drive southeast of Lyons, which was just evacuated due to the growing Alexander Mountain fire. Smoke has filled the air around Colorado’s capital city, and it has mostly obscured the mountains that famously form the backdrop to our skyline.

The air has a crunch to it. I can feel something akin to a small pebble grind between my teeth every time I clench my jaw, and it has a distinct taste. My brain is under attack by my senses, as my nose smells something wonderous and comforts it with the crackle of a campfire, while everything else in my body alerts it to the coming apocalypse.

This is nothing new for us Coloradans. Fire season has always been a feature of our summers, but like everything else impacted by climate change, its intensity has skyrocketed. In the last five years I have had to adapt to a life which accepts the reality that going outside and breathing the air for days or weeks on end “can pose serious, immediate risks to your safety and health” according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. I have stopped walking my dogs at certain hours, as the Air Quality Index now informs more of my summer days than weather forecasts do, and countless others across our outdoorsy state are adjusting to a world where one of the building blocks of life routinely becomes hostile to it.

The West is in the midst of a “megadrought” that is the worst in 1,200 years, and according to Ann Willis, a researcher at the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California at Davis, “There’s no good news for the foreseeable future, for the next few decades. Fundamentally addressing climate change is the ultimate answer. … If we don’t, then what we’re really seeing is just preamble to an even more extreme and catastrophic set of conditions.”

The Colorado River is drying up. So is the Great Salt Lake, emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide along with it. California’s drought is so acute that Los Angeles has prohibited all outdoor watering between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Extreme wildfires appear to have doubled in the last 20 years. Kansas is now enduring under a new Dust Bowl. The current conditions are already pretty catastrophic for millions of people across the West, and we can all see them getting worse every year.

Which means more fires and hotter summers exacerbating them, like the one raging on Alexander Mountain as you read this. As the east coast learned last year, this year, and countless times before, the distance between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains is trivial for deadly particulates and air currents. No one is safe from forest fires.

And it will only get worse.

This is it. The last hurrah for states like Colorado and Utah as “cool” climates. Arizona’s heat border is expanding north, encompassing two states many associate with snow-capped mountains, but when I look out my window, I can’t see them. All I see is the haze of their incinerated remains blotting out one of the most beautiful purple mountain majesties this country has to offer.

To give you a sense of the apocalyptic nature of these fires, below is what this view looks like when the mountains aren’t billowing plumes of deadly smoke into the air.

The taste, I can’t get it out of my mouth. I’ve tried coffee, mints, mouthwash—nothing works—all I taste is death. Trees that a few weeks ago helped dot an awe-inspiring landscape are now invading my lungs, taking some immeasurable amount of time off my life. Every moment I spend in this haze means one less moment outside it down the road.

And my poor dogs. They are outside dogs, and even after this half-decade of adjusting to a more extreme new normal, they still do not understand why I am frantically calling them inside at the same time every day when the AQI inevitably rises to near unsafe conditions. Man’s ego leads us to view evolution as something that happened in the past, but one trip to my town proves it is still ongoing, as a litany of life forms out here in fire country are altering their day-to-day routines to accommodate a more deadly status quo.

America’s cult of optimism demands I end this column on a positive note, on some kind of new development to look forward to in the future. We like to think that not everything is all good or all bad, but there is nothing in our arsenal to stop the dynamic of a large, warm, dry area filled with firewood getting warmer and dryer. It’s a fact that our future summers will be filled with more air that seemingly has a physical structure and a distinctive taste to it. The lone positive I can leave our cult of optimism with is that at least it smells good in this looming apocalypse, and you eventually get used to the taste too.