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Visitors in San Francisco's Dolores Park under an orange sky darkened by smoke from the California wildfires on Wednesday.
Stephen Lam / Reuters
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Smoke from the California wildfires hangs over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Wednesday.
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Building inspector Bejhan Razi reviews repairs to a clock on Miller and Throckmorton avenues in downtown Mill Valley, California, on Wednesday.
Scott Strazzante / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty Images
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People stand in Alamo Square Park as smoke hangs over San Francisco on Wednesday.
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People in San Francisco take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, affected by smoke from nearby wildfires on Wednesday, September 9.
Eric Risberg / AP
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Firefighters battle to protect structures in Butte County, California, on Sept. 9 Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
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Flames shoot out of a home in Butte County.
Noah Berger / AP
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A Pacific Gas and Electric worker watches the creek fire progress near Alder Springs, California, on Tuesday, September 8.
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Lisa Theis unloads the last of her 44 alpacas after evacuating her ranch in North Fork, California.
Peter DaSilva / UPI / Alamy Live News
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Flames burn in a house ravaged by the Creek Fire in Fresno County, California.
Noah Berger / AP
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A slide melts in a schoolyard in Fresno County.
Noah Berger / AP
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Debris left on Monday, September 7, after a wildfire left the small town of Malden, Washington in ruins.
The fire destroyed approximately 80% of the houses and buildings.
Jesse Tinsley / AP
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Firefighter Nick Grinstead fights the Creek Fire in Shaver Lake, California, on September 7.
Noah Berger / AP
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A firefighter in Jamul, California, fights the Valley Fire on Sunday, September 6.
Sandy Huffaker / AFP / Getty Images
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A fire invades Japatul Street in Jamul on September 6.
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Minor league baseball players warm up for a game near Dehesa, California, as the Valley fire burns on September 6.
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A firefighter watches the creek fire progress in Shaver Lake.
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
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A business owner on Shaver Lake walks past the kayaks he rents as smoke from the Creek fire fills the sky on September 6.
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Members of a family comfort each other as the El Dorado fire approaches their home in Yucaipa, California, on September 6.
Terry Pierson / Orange County Register / Zuma
Editor's Note:
Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collections "Work & Days," "The Forage House," and more recently, "Rift Zone" and "Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange."
The opinions expressed in this comment are solely yours.
Read more opinion pieces at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN) -
Wednesday was like the sun never rose.
Dawn was cloudy and at 8am it seemed to get dark.
A haze of rusty red bronze rose around us, but there was no light either.
Inside the house, we relight our lamps against the twilight.
The windows were darkened and outside, all morning, over the trees, the sky blazed an eerie red.
Where we had left the windows open to the night breeze, our papers, clothes, combs, and brushes were covered in a thin layer of ash.
The air floated, sandy and strangely cold.
It was hard not to feel a deep feeling.
I wish I was writing a fantasy novel.
It is not.
This was just Wednesday air in the Bay Area, Wednesday weather, three weeks after this year's fire season.
The air on Tuesday was pretty good, but on Wednesday we had fog, smoke, ash and there was no light.
Where we are, ash aside, the air metrics aren't actually very terrible, maybe 70 on the Air Quality Index (AQI), which we rate correct, since for our family (no asthma, thank heaven , reasonable health) only the air starts to get really terrible at 150 depending on which website you visit.
On Wednesday, even though it looked terrible, scary and gloomy, we tried to move on.
These are the kinds of judgments you learn to make when there is at least one fire season a year and when, each year, that fire season seems to drag on.
It's the kind of thing you know well when you're in your fourth straight season of fire and smoke in California.
To be clear: Since the LNU lightning fires started on August 17, the air has been dangerously bad from time to time.
People look out over the horizon darkened by daytime wildfire smoke from Kite Hill Open Space in San Francisco on September 9.
In case you're wondering, the decision tree when the sky resembles Mordor during a firestorm and smoke, which also happens during a pandemic, looks like this: check the air, send the kids into groups carefully selected where rotating parents with masks are exchanged to watch children with masks learn outdoors.
Go home.
Try to get some work done.
If the air quality is too bad, go get the kids.
Juggle again.
Feel lucky to even have these options.
Be grateful that everyone is safe enough.
We are lucky.
We are privileged.
Still, can we pause and ask what is enough here?
What is safe now?
May I also point out that none of this is okay?
The social, natural, governmental and ecological systems, which we all desperately need to have a civic life expectancy and life on the planet, are collapsing at an alarming rate.
LOOK: Red sky and burning forests: this is what fires look like on the west coast
Here's the other truth: In this collapse, I don't have time to write a fantasy novel.
I hardly have time to think, cry, or plan what's next.
It is almost dangerous to feel: being sad can be overturning, being angry would be wasting hours in rage.
I do what I can.
I like to joke that every day feels like "Iron Chef" - you wake up and check the air and your temperature and gleefully try to do something decent with the strange set of options left in the world we used to know.
That.
Right now my daughter is doing a riddle about unicorns.
The air improved a bit, so we let our son play outside with his friend.
That feels good.
Again, I am grateful, grateful, grateful.
But where is all this going?
How much stranger or scarier will it get?
Last week it was very hot with terrible air, so we huddled in the cool garage next to the air purifier, trying to keep cool and also to breathe.
I ran the day like we were on a long flight, getting everyone to get up and stretch, handing out snacks, taking a joke break.
We did some yoga.
We play a silly phone game.
We even laugh.
Smoke from the Creek Fire fills the air over a boat dock in Shaver Lake, California, on September 6.
But someone, please tell me, where, oh where, is this flight we're headed for?
It's a terrifying and harrowing flight, and I want us all to get down.
I would like for all of us to disembark and have some snacks, and maybe a nice drink at the bar, and then have a chance to discover how to live together as humans on this earth again.
When I don't deliver peanuts at the right time, I work for climate justice and electoral change.
I'm sure I'm ready to vote.
If any of this is remote enough, I don't know.
A scientist I spoke with recently said that the temperature of the western old forest that he has been monitoring since the 1970s has risen one degree Celsius per decade for 50 years.
It is asking a lot of all these hills, trees and grasses to absorb that change.
It is also a lot to ask of humans.
I grew up in the Bay Area and I know that these fire seasons did not occur in my childhood.
So we were afraid of earthquakes.
Now, everything falls, each fall we live downwind.
I don't know what lies beyond this.
MORE: California Wildfires Show How Climate Change Is Making Forced Evacuations And Power Outages The Norm
Every year I write a little essay about the fire season.
Every year for four years, we pack our bags, play movies, pray, wait, wait, cry, and sing songs.
We've been in it for three weeks this year, in smoky bad air and I haven't even written a word about it so far, partly because it overlaps all the other 2020 catastrophes, any other form of improvisation and wait, and hoping and trying to get ahead.
I have no easy way to end this essay, other than saying that I know that for many people it is much, much worse.
Just because it's not the worst it could be doesn't mean you can't say this is bad.
I cry for all of us.
The sky hangs low.
This present is more than enough.
CaliforniaFireSan Francisco