One Nation, Under God

The Most Depressing Season Has Started

In a state known for weather extremes, it’s the most dreary that I most dislike.

While a week of sub-zero temperatures quickly grows old, and summer heat waves are hotter and last longer than ever before, both pale in comparison to the depressing downer of smoke season.

Typically, we don’t have to deal with smoke in Montana until later in the summer when the forests dry and start to burn. It’s all preventable, we’re told, if only the forests were better maintained. One former president, in a stroke of genius, even suggested the forests be raked to prevent such conflagrations.

He probably wasn’t aware that this is an international problem.

Last winter was brutal. Snow arrived early and stayed late. Flooding, not forest fires, was on everyone’s radar this spring. Then last week, out of the clear, blue skies came a blanket of smoke from the north cutting visibility to yards instead of miles. Hundreds of wildfires burning in Canada, along with a weather system pushing south, are to blame.

Until rain arrives up north, smoke is our new reality.

It’s hard to escape, although following a change in the weather pattern it could quickly vanish and become someone else’s problem somewhere else.

Until then I’ll find something to do inside, and I hate being inside during the month of May.

Problems along the southern border may dominate the news, but the northern border could also use some work. Immigrants from Honduras certainly don’t concern me as much as this smoke does. I suggest a wall of large box fans be plugged in to send the offending cloud back to the Great White North. Make Canada pay the bill.

Until then my view of the Big Sky ends a few hazy blocks away. The sky overhead remains an opaque off-white, and the stink is difficult to escape.

Before 1988, wildfires and their accompanying clouds of smoke weren’t much of a concern to me. The Yellowstone Park fires that year, however, heralded a change in the climate. We’ve seen few summers since then that haven’t been smoky.

Now we’re dealing with smoke, and summer is still a month away.

It’s not something you can dress for like heat or cold. It’s impossible to ignore. Even inside the house with the windows closed the smell of campfire lingers.

I suppose thoughts and prayers are all we’ve got.

This time we can’t even blame the Democrats.

Parker Heinlein is at pman @mtintouch.net

 

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