Fire, Smoke, and Stupidity

        Alas! The smoke returned! 

        We had been doing just fine this summer. We had some clouds, some light rain, but no lightning, no fires, no smoke. Nothing to close down Oregon Shakespeare Festival's outdoor shows and the Britt Music Festival's theater-under-the-stars. Nothing to keep people indoors, windows firmly shut, or, if outdoors, in dust masks (which, I know now, don't protect against smoke, anyway). I saw OSF's MacBeth and All's Well That Ends Well outdoors and went to a Britt concert. I hiked in the Red Buttes Wilderness and up Mt. Elijah and, like everyone else, was thoroughly enjoying the summer. 

          Until.

        Some idiot, some stupid, stupid, carless individual, lit a campfire. I couldn't believe it! Didn't he know how dangerous that is?  Didn't he know that we're in fire season and fires are illegal? Don't people pay attention? I wanted to throttle him for ruining our fine summer, casting the gloom of smoke over all our outdoor lives.

        I don't know who started the Milepost 97 fire, but if I were to make a guess, I would say that it was a homeless man (woman, maybe, but odds are it was a man) who only wanted to cook some dinner. That's all. A homeless man with low mental capacity, who just wanted something hot to eat. Other fires, such as the one in Atlanta that burned a bridge and closed a major freeway, have started that way.

        So my hypothetical homeless man lit a fire, and the fire ran around in the dry grasses, and suddenly the forests in the deep canyons and on the steep hills of the Siskiyou were burning again, the smell of woodsmoke throttled the air, and the Rogue Valley was smothered under a gray moroseness that pressed down on our hills and our heads and our happiness. Ordinary outdoor life was suddenly sucked inward. I did see people eating outdoors at restaurants and cafes, but either they don't care or they're not very smart or they haven't read the air quality index. But that's an individual stupidity and hurts no one but the stupid individual. 

        Everyone suffers when fires burn and smoke descends. Businesses lose money. Tourists have to make new plans. Rafting guides loiter at home. Outdoor venues close. Even besides how unhappy it makes us to have to be indoors in our beautiful landscape, smoke has become a serious economic problem for the Rogue Valley.

        In a way smoke is a price we pay for living in this fire-prone and fire-dependent ecology. I accept lightning-caused fires as a natural occurrence. But when fires are caused by people, when we suffer the same ill effects because of someone's stupidity and ignorance of or disregard of the law, I become furious. Those fires should never happen. And look what they do to us!

       So I have at least a partial solution. If we are concerned about the implications of smoke in our area, maybe we should think about ways to help the homeless. It would be a lot cheaper than fighting fires.