(I wrote this post this morning, but didn't have time to publish it before we fled the smoke in search of clean air-- which we found in the community of Hope an hour north of us.)
(The view of Seward this morning from Lowell Pt Rd.)
If you don’t live in South Central Alaska, you might not know that this temperate rainforest we love burns as I write, after months with almost no measurable rain. Depending on the wind the smoke in Seward fluctuates between the unhealthy and hazardous zones.
It’s currently off the charts, above hazardous, with smoke levels not classified by the EPA.
Elias, with his damaged lungs, says the smoke doesn't bother him, but he moves even slower than normal, stares at his food, sits at the table sniffing, and looks like someone punched him in the nose with the two dark circles under his eyes from lack of oxygen.
“Does any part of you feel different,” I ask.
He shakes his head from side to side and looks at his nail-bitten hands.
Elias started 9th grade this week. My former micro-preemie walks through the halls of Seward High School with his one fore-arm crutch and his rolling back-pack filled with supplies. He stops at the door to my new office where I’m struggling to learn all the ins and outs of scheduling and gives me his Queen Elizabeth wave.
“Hi, Mom. I’m having a great day.”
“Is that your son?” students ask. When I say yes they smile. Students in Seward seem especially kind, open, and patient, even with their new counselor who has registered a handful of students as the wrong grade and often replies to their inquiries with: “That is a good question, I don't know the answer yet, but I’ll add it to my list to found out.”
On my door, I posted a sign with a picture of two hands forming a heart that reads: “Thank you for your patience, I’m learning too.”
Its been a long full first week of school with multiple fourteen hour days.
The Kenai Peninsula School districted cancelled all outdoor activities due to the smoke, so for the first week of 4th grade Olive spent every recess in the classroom. Regardless, she comes home every day and says: “School was fun today.”
I miss our mountain playground, as we all find ourselves inside on sunny days, with smoke thick enough to taste. I have never before heard so many folks in Alaska plead for rain.
A sixteen mile Lost Lake trail run for Cystic Fibrosis, that I planned to participate in today, with a team from Spring Creek Correctional Center, was cancelled to protect runners’ lungs.
To add to the insanity, the Snow River glacial damn broke, so Cooper Landing and the upper Kenai River, which has already been experiencing the worst effects of the Swan Lake Fire, may now face flooding as well.
Forget lions and tigers and bears—fires and floods and drought, oh my.
And the Swan Lake Fire is just one of countless wildfires burning Alaska. The Mckinley Fire up north burned over 80 structures at the last count, as more and more people evacuate.
The good news is that so far everyone has survived. Houses and belongings destroyed, but no loss of life.
So we have that celebrate.
And the way people open their homes to each other.
All over social media I’ve seen posts offering stranded motorists (at times the only road south and the only road north of Anchorage have been closed due to fire activity) and evacuees places to stay. People are offering up their spare bedrooms for families to sleep, their driveways for RV’s, their land for animals.
Seward opened up the high school as a shelter for people who couldn't get back to the other side of the peninsula when the fire closed the road. Volunteers helped staff the building.
To me, this is what makes Alaska, and in extension America, a place I’m proud to call home, when we open our doors and invite lost souls inside.
I keep thinking about the children in Mississippi who returned from their first day of school with their backpacks and stories to find no parents at home to greet them. The young ones can’t understand the politics behind deportation, only the pain of a vacant kitchen, of no familiar arms to hug. Who was there to ask them about their first day of school?
School was fun today.
How will anything ever be right again?
And I think about the over-crowded detention centers at the border, where families still search for each other, and for safety, and for hope, and for the land of the free.
This land where rainforests burn, salmon die in too-warm waters, whales starve, land erodes, and storms intensify.
How did politics override humanity? How does legislation pass that contradicts nature?
Its another sunny Saturday in Seward, though the great red orb hides behind a veil of smoke.
Elias still sits and stares at his food, an adolescent boy not eating, chewing on his fingers instead.
All is not right in this world I love.
This world I love.
(Picture taken today in Hope, Alaska)