This morning, in the Bay Area, we awoke to an eerie sight. Wildfires raging out of control to the south and east had blanketed our sky with particulates. The winds over the water to the north and west had stalled. The entire region was swathed in a dark gray cloak.
As I dropped the kids off for their (second) day of school, I maneuvered my vehicle into a traffic lane headed for the freeway on-ramp, and that is when I first glimpsed the sun.
Shed of its jagged wild mane, our star looked naked, a dull orange ball floating in the smoke. You didn't need sunglasses; you didn't need to look away.
The world felt strange, and scary. It's the kind of time that sleep can be hard to come by, and your feelings may lurch this way and that. It's as ugly as Sudbury was in the old days of nickel mining, an activity so toxic that when I visited the Canadian town in the late Sixties, not a tree or bush was alive for miles all around it, and of the people walking its sullen streets, not one wore a smile.
It was that moment and others like it that determined my main choice of subject matter for my nascent career as a journalist -- environmental investigative reporting. Thirty-nine years later, the need for such work is more urgent than ever.
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