Thunder echoes from the mountain this morning as welcome rain washes the air clean again. That mountain air that we advertise for the envy of our friends in the city has of late been nothing to brag about.
Daniel Boone is credited with saying that when you could see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney it was time to move someplace less crowded. I know that some of us, myself included, understand how he felt. Sadly, there is hardly anyplace left that is less crowded. Or less smoky.
Personally, I don’t mind an occasional whiff of oak from my neighbor’s chimney. It is an aroma that reminds me of homes and hearths from simpler times, of bonfires and campfires from the days when we knew enough people unburdened by wage slavery or pinned down by gravity and inertia to get up off the couch and go sit around the fire. Alas, we barely know enough now for a friend or two to just sit across.
But the smoke we have endured so often in the last several years has not been the incense of good fellowship. Much of it has come from well-planned and increasingly urgent efforts to manage the forests and make them less dangerous for all the people perched on the mountaintops and crowding the hillsides. It’s an unfriendly smoke of extremely fine particles that draws deep into the lungs and shortens life expectancy. It is misery for people with respiratory problems. They say it even causes cognitive impairment. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?
More frequently than any time in living memory, the smoke visits us now. Sometimes it comes from hundreds of miles away; sometimes from the fool next door burning leaves during a red flag warning, or the developer who still doesn’t understand, or care, that a pile of roots and dirt produces as much smoke as fire.
It’s difficult to explain the change to someone who hasn’t lived here. Nantahala is a Cherokee word that means roughly, “land of the noonday sun,” but those storied mountains rarely live up to their name now. The Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains, which were so named for the lingering moisture in the air which appeared as clouds of smoke or a blue haze when seen from a distance, have all but lost those distinctive features.
Thank God the rains still come. Two years ago we recorded over 100 inches at our weather station at home. But now the fronts that bring the rain are often followed by days of unrelenting wind that robs the moisture from the surface and elevates fire danger. Just last week we had two days of rain and a mere two days after, another red flag warning.
I asked well-known meteorologist, Glenn Burns, about this phenomenon last year, and he attributed much of it to the El Nino event that was occurring. A deeper dive into the meteorology reveals a complexity that scientists labor to understand, but events are currently following a predicted pattern of increased wildfire activity in the Southern Appalachians.
In 2016, the year Towns County was squeezed between two large wildfires to our east and northwest, a record 231 square miles of our southern forests burned. If the prediction holds true, we’ll see an average 310 square miles burn every year until 2100.
The US Forest Service and state forestry officials are well aware of the predicted trend, and they are doing everything they can to get ahead of the problem. Expect to see more smoke in the future. I know it can be miserable, but when it does happen, be grateful that it’s coming from far away and not from the hillside you see through your front window. The smoke you see from a controlled burn is part of an effort to keep your home from going up in smoke as well.
At this point, I would like to issue a challenge to county and state officials as well as emergency services. We have a lot of senior citizens among us who are particularly vulnerable to the smoke that settles so often in our valleys now. Most of us are not in the habit of searching the internet for air quality and wildfire maps for warnings ahead of controlled burns, so many of us go out unprepared when the air quality is bad. This problem is not going to go away soon, and it can get worse. We have a good workable system in place for emergency services to warn us with phone calls when storms are imminent. Perhaps an air quality warning can be added as well, or a push notification to cell phones, in addition to coordinating with local newspapers and radio stations.
Outside The Box 