Smoke gets in your eyes

It’s an odd weather forecast...smoke.

It’s an odd weather forecast.

Smoke.

Rain, sleet, snow…even gloom of night. That’s weather. Fog, frost, hurricane and drought…that’s weather too. Y’know – phenomena of nature and, far as I can tell, Mother Nature doesn’t smoke.

Or, maybe the way we’ve been treating her has driven her to start.

In any case, they skies are milky, sunsets unnaturally orange, and great swaths of earth are going from green to black. We’ve raised hell with the environment and it looks it.

In any case, with a goodly chunk of Manitoba set ablaze that smoke has to go somewhere and for the last few days it’s become Canada’s number one export … no tariffs charged. What’s left of the National Weather Service has been issuing air quality warnings, essentially telling us that breathing is hazardous to our health.

In a strange way, I find those warnings sort of comforting. When I was a kid we didn’t have to import bad air, we had plenty that we’d made ourselves. I was on my way out of high school before anybody came up with Earth Day. A comedian quipped he was uncomfortable when he was outside of American cities because, “I want to see the air I’m breathing.”

Back then, smoke wasn’t weather, it was everywhere. House after house belched coal smoke come winter. The billows from factory chimneys was a welcome signal of prosperity. Car exhaust left a thick blue contrail, and half of us filled the air around us with clouds of tobacco smoke wherever we’d go.

Smoke wasn’t weather, it was climate.

And boy, have we experienced climate change.

So let’s hope the Canadian rains come, the skies turn blue again, and the smoke from the neighbor’s barbecue has the breeze all to itself