FIRE & SMOKE
Southern B.C. chokes as vast swath of forest burns in Western Canada
Kristin Zerbin is reaching for the right words, because things have been getting pretty weird in Vancouver lately. To articulate the weirdness one must take a deep breath and look out of the window, and look into people’s eyes, deeply, because every face in the city of Vancouver seems written over with the same quizzical expression.
It is a look that says: this is so “eerie.” So “spooky.” So “strange,” and so not Vancouver, not in the summer, when the sun is supposed to be shining off the mountains and the air is supposed to taste like salt — not ash. And then there is the smoke, an oppressive grey haze that is scratching at residents’ throats, and eyes, and making everything, everything — hair, clothes, office buildings, homes, car interiors — smell like a giant campfire.
B.C. is burning, as is much of Western Canada, with 886 (and counting) wildfires ripping across the province, whipping great big plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. Blotting out the sun in Vancouver and inspiring many, Zerbin, a meditation instructor, among them, to ask some deeper life questions.
“Walking downtown to work this morning I just keep thinking what if this all went to flames? What would we do then?” she says. “And I keep thinking about what it was like hundreds of years ago for people, when life was much less certain, and safe. When people were threatened by things that were bigger than them.”
Things like forest fires, and the smoke they generate. For Vancouverites, forest fires are something that happen someplace else — in the interior of the province, or its north.
But present wind patterns have been pushing smoke from three large fires on the Sunshine Coast and Sea-to-Sky area into the metropolitan region, creating a situation where the air quality is abysmal — the elderly, young, and people with respiratory problems are being urged to stay indoors — and the overriding vibe around town is downright apocalyptic.
Emily Murgatroyd is an executive recruiter. She woke up Sunday morning in Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was hot, and sunny, but within 15 minutes of rolling back toward the ferry terminal in Nanaimo and Vancouver beyond, the atmosphere had shifted. The haze appeared. The sun bled orange. At the ferry docks, it started raining ash, fine white particles that blanketed cars, seeping through windows.
Murgatroyd smelled her threeyear old’s hair, as moms do. It smelled of smoke. Now back in Vancouver, she describes the atmosphere as an “uneasy calm,” an otherworldly stillness — like that fleeting moment before the clouds split open and a thunderstorm strikes. But the moment in Vancouver is not fleeting. It just goes on, and on. The skies aren’t splitting open. They are drowning in smoke. People are waiting, but for what?
“It is spooky,” Murgatroyd says. “Because no one is used to this, and no one can remember something like this happening before. We have a fire season in B.C., obviously, but it happens in other places, not at your doorstep.
“It is like the zombie apocalypse. The sun looks like another planet. It makes you think about the end of time.”
In Surrey, Ryan Henderson, a radio producer, has been think- ing about his feet. He was walking barefoot in the grass the other day, because it is what people do in their backyards in the summer, only the grass was so dry, it felt like he was walking across a bed of nails.
“The grass hurt my feet,” Henderson says.
Brennan Storr is a writer/pho- tographer in Victoria. He woke up Sunday and felt a creative rush. The sky was orange, and so he had to get moving, and so he did, driving through the city snapping pictures of places where people should be by midday — but weren’t. He shot buildings, and roads, an auto shop, a forlorn looking cat peering out a window and a swing set at a typically bustling city park, but with no kids visible at noon.
The air was still, he says, and oddly cool, and the more he drove and photographed images bathed in the strange orange light, the more he felt his mood affected by the landscape he was documenting.
“There was this initial excitement of having something unique to take pictures of,” Storr says. “But once I actually got out, it started to sink in, this sombre feel to things, as though you were moving through a dream.
“The light just doesn’t look the way it should.”
Kristin Zerbin has been contemplating performing a “rain dance.” And she knows she is not the only one who has been. People keep dropping by the yoga centre where she works on Granville Street. Everybody is talking, but they only want to talk about one subject.
“All people want to talk about is the smoke,” she says. “Or else we get a lot of American tourists stopping in here — they all want directions, because they are lost.”
Lost, yes, in an urban paradise perched by the sea. Swallowed by smoke, stinking like campfire, waiting for favourable winds and rains to rescue them.