When the sky turns to smoke...
What do we do when the shadow of disaster darkens our front door?
In August of 2001, I was driving east at dawn on U.S. Interstate 90 as a friend slept in the back seat. The two of us had just road-tripped to Ohio for a Radiohead concert and we were headed back home to Western New York State. It was actually his car that I was driving, and I was happy to have a turn at the wheel now that I felt refreshed after a couple of hours of sleep at a truck stop. The sleep had been uncomfortable yet adequate enough so that I was alert and engaged, no longer at risk of dozing-off at the wheel while driving through the night. It was also nice to have some time to sit with my own thoughts as the emerging light slowly brought the surrounding landscape to life, even though clouds had begun to gather…
A handful of things about that trip have always stuck with me. First, on the way to the show, which took place at the Blossom amphitheatre in Cuyahoga Falls (outside of Akron), the highway was backed-up for miles leading up to the exit for the venue. As any experienced concertgoer can tell you, traffic holdups are par for the course with this type of indoor/outdoor “shed” facility. Many of those venues are situated such that there’s only one nearby highway that just can’t accommodate the traffic from several thousand people all driving to the same exit at once.
But I was hell-bent on not getting to that show late. I knew from painful past experiences that we wouldn’t make it in time if we just sat there waiting in traffic. I’ve never fully gotten over missing the first two bands at the second edition of Lollapalooza under basically identical circumstances (even though I can at least come close to simulating them here and here — in ratty sound quality, but it’s better than nothing). I knew it would be a major bummer to miss any of the show after coming all this way. So, in a fit of willfulness, I took matters into my own hands and headed for the next exit to try my luck with the backroads.
Mind you, this was before GPS, and I was basically fumbling my way blind through an unfamiliar area with the mounting sense that the clock was ticking. When my friend and I found a gas station, the person behind the counter basically shrugged and said they didn’t know the way to venue. At that moment, a customer who happened to be standing in line chimed-in and gave us the directions. Still thinking we were pressed for time, we hopped in the car and hit it.
Rolling by the picturesque rows of rural housing, we were able to drive right up to the entry gates from the opposite direction as most everyone else, feeling triumphant as we bypassed the long line of cars still waiting to get in. As it turned out, we were early, but it was a lesson in being able to reach down and pull a rabbit out of a hat when needed. My friend was impressed. I was impressed too, but when something like that happens, even though I get this prideful surge of Wow, I just did that! it always feels more like bewilderment, like something larger than myself stepped in and took over on my behalf.
There have been other moments like this in my life, where it’s like I’m able to tap into a larger current and I kind of just end up landing on my feet somehow. I can’t explain why at times I just know I’m going to find a way around an obstacle, but I feel like I’m being carried on a current, where there’s wind in the sails and the boat steers almost of its own volition and then a giant hand just gently places me where I was intending to go. Yes, I feel pumped and I raise my fist in the air like an athlete who just scored a winning goal but I’m left standing there in a swirling mix of adrenaline, chest-thumping and Wait, did that just really happen?
Truth be told, I wasn’t exactly riveted by the show. I found Radiohead, at least on that night, to be surprisingly lacking in energy, urgency and — perhaps worst of all — a sense of pacing. And even in spots where the song selection on paper gave the band some runway to get into a groove, lengthy pauses between tunes halted the momentum before it could even get off the ground. I recall being struck by the absence of self-assurance coming from the stage.
I went back and listened to the bootleg recording pasted above. (You can download a different recording here.) The flow works a lot better for me now than it did at the time, but I still feel like Radiohead fell way short of inspiring the rapture their music form that period still induces in me. Not that they band was lazy or half-assed, but they seemed disinterested in the live show as a place to achieve transcendence. It was if they had no comprehension of the power they were capable of putting across. And I got the sense that the wherewithal and/or the desire just wasn’t there to grab the moment by the horns and really go for it.
Sometimes, being self-effacing and averse to rock-star grandiosity can cut a performance off at the knees, and I hate to see a band appear to be diminished by the scale of their own music onstage. The two records they were touring at the time, the era-defining one-two punch of Kid A and Amnesiac, made such a profound impression on me (and, let’s face it, music as a whole) that my expectations were understandably high. I was lucky enough to write about those albums twenty years after their original release, and my impression of them hasn’t diminished at all.
An excerpt:
At the time of Kid A’s release, it was clear that the band was voicing a malaise bubbling up in our collective awareness as we hurtled towards a heavily media-enmeshed way of life. None of us could have known what that would look like two decades later, but listening back now, it seems safe to say that we had some gut-level precognition of what it would feel like, which is part of why Kid A still resonates so strongly.
And this (a line that haunts me, even though I over-use it):
In a sense, you could say that the digitized froth at the beginning of Kid A album opener “Everything In Its Right Place” was the sound of the future arriving at our doorstep.
I’m still happy very happy that I went, and the trip was well worthwhile on number of levels…
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The second thing that sticks in my memory took place in the immediate moments after the show was over when, as usual, throngs of people started heading for the exits. We hung out on the lawn for a bit before making our way out to leave, but we still got stuck in what you’d call a moderate crush of people. For some reason, only one of four exit gates was open, with attendees allowed to file out of that one gate at a much slower rate than the people pouring into the courtyard area leading up to the gates. (If you’ve ever been to one of these venues, you can easily picture what I’m describing.) It wasn’t long before I was trapped — uncomfortably cramped in a large crowd in penned into a confined space.
It wasn’t unbearable by any means. I could still breath, and I was able to keep calm. Everyone, thank goodness, stayed very calm and compliant and just moved along — slowly, but steadily. Still, I remember having the thought:
I’m completely at the mercy of this situation. There’s nowhere to go, and if even one single person here decides to cause a problem — or if something happens that causes everyone to panic — there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. If someone has a health issue or faints, there won’t be any way to get the person out of here or get them help in time. And if I were to get trampled and die here, an insurance company would make a payout, but there’s a good chance that, in the end, no one would be held accountable for the decision to keep only one of these gates open.
I remember being struck with the impression — like a jolt of cold water to the face — that the concert industry must see concertgoers as animal-like herds. All of these thoughts went through my head with the three closed gates in full view just a hundred yards or so away. What would it have taken for someone to make an executive decision to open those other gates, and why were they closed? What possible purpose could it have served to put the audience at risk like this?
Of course, there were concert staff present helping usher people out, but I just got the sense that the chain of bureaucracy was configured in such a way that no one was going to do anything — and that it wouldn’t even occur to anyone to do something because it was just assumed that a decision was someone else’s call. So the concert ushers just stood there blank-eyed doing what they’d been told to do. It was clear to me then that the chain of command in modern life has arranged itself so that no one can make the right decision, even when the right decision — and the imperative to make it — is right there staring you in the face…
The lack of judgment on display that evening was especially egregious given the fact that one of the worst tragedies in American concert history had taken place in the same state just two decades prior — still recent enough at the time to be remembered — when 11 people died under eerily similar conditions at a Who concert in Cincinnati. During a psychology lecture back in my abortive bid as a college student in the early ‘90s, one of my favorite professors in my entire time at college used that same concert tragedy to illustrate a point about group psychology. When the professor asked if anyone had heard about that incident, a fellow student in the class raised his hand and said he’d actually gone to that show as a kid with his dad.
Surprisingly, the Who concert went on as scheduled. As we would come to find out, the band wasn’t informed until after the fact that people had died trying to get in to see them play. The guy in my psych class didn’t realize what had happened until the next day. To be fair, the crowd crush getting out of the Radiohead show was nowhere near as serious as it had been for those unlucky people in Cincinnati. But as I inched ever so slowly toward being able to breathe easy, it hit me that concerts are unsafe not just because of the actual hazards you might encounter, but because we’re all caught in the gears of something that’s gotten too big and unwieldy to respond when the system hiccups and a few people happened to get chewed up.
Terrible, dangerous decisions are made — or, in this case, not made — and then the responsibility gets spread out and diffused over endless layers of bureaucracy. If something tragic had happened, it’s possible that the person responsible might not even realize it had been their lapse in judgment that led to loss of life. Thankfully, no one was harmed that day, but I’m still left to wonder about how much we passively allow ourselves to be corralled and caged. How many preventable hazards end up arising in our path that can’t even be attributed to a defined source? Surely there must be another way…
What lingers most in my memory about that trip, however, is the sensation of staring out onto the open road as dawn gave way to a solid pillow-like mass of grayish-white cloud cover that took up the entire sky. It wasn’t exactly gloomy, but there was something about the way the road extended forward to the horizon that gave me an ominous sense, almost as if all of us were being pulled forward in time towards a grim future that was fast approaching.
Peering into the featureless gray, I could vaguely envision some kind of nightmare up ahead — something, perhaps, akin to what Tina Turner was referencing when, at the beginning of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, she sang "they always said that the living would envy the dead.” Again, I was in actually in pretty buoyant spirits. So the feeling hadn’t stemmed from my mood. A little later, in fact, it felt especially pleasant to hit the morning-commute traffic outside of Buffalo as the gentle murmur of morning talk radio filled the space in the front of the car.
But there had something unmistakably foreboding in that grayness, almost as if a message were being transmitted backwards through time.
A month later, 9/11 happened.
On the evening of Monday, June 5th 2023 — about a week ago as I write this — I looked out my window and was immediately taken aback by the odd, pinkish hue of the setting sun. The city I’ve called home for the last thirty-plus years is known for dazzling sunsets that are often characterized by splashy color patterns that can look quite surreal. I figured this was just another one of those instances. Besides, I was too busy admiring it to think anything might be amiss. The sun looked amazing, an almost-neon peach/salmon-pink glow in a perfect circle shape that was very clearly delineated from the rest of the sky.
I’d never seen such a sharply defined circle around the sun. I made it a point to take it in, because I’m used to the sunsets here being one-of-a-kind events that never repeat. The following morning — June 6th — I woke up and noticed right away that there was something unusual, even sickly, about the light coming in from outside. I looked out to find everything blanketed by a yellow haze. I sensed right away that something was off.
I could immediately tell when I opened my front door that the air was heavy with the scent of fire. If you merely went outside, it was like stepping into a charcoal pit — very pronounced at this stage, but still fairly moderate. Watching the weather forecast that morning, one of the local meteorologists talked about how we’d be contending with lowered air quality throughout the day. His tone was calm. “This is going to be an issue throughout the day,” he said. But there was no indication of how serious the situation was about to get…
According to official reports, hundreds of wildfires are currently burning across nearly all of Canada’s provinces. About half the fires have been designated to be “out of control.” And so, on June 7th, massive smoke clouds drifted over a swath of the Eastern U.S. so extensive that the smoke reached all the way down to Georgia. Across Lake Ontario from Toronto, Rochester (where I live) was particularly hard-hit.
When all of a sudden you’re faced with the possibility that there might soon be nowhere to go where you can breathe, let’s just say it gets your mind going. As a parent, my thoughts immediately went to some dark places, especially with memories still fresh from the way the authorities mis-handled and issued false assurances of safety in the wake of the train derailment and subsequent chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio this past February:
What if, I wondered, this is worse than we’re being told? What if there’s more than just burned wood in that smoke? What if there are dangerous chemicals that we’re all breathing-in? What if the source of this smoke isn’t actually forest fires but… something else?
It didn’t surprise me that local schools hadn’t been closed. My daughter was outside in that, if even for just a few moments, I thought.
Then: Jesus, what do I do if…
I stayed calm, fighting-off the mental images flickering in my imagination of my daughter having difficulty breathing, her life potentially threatened by the air itself.
The following day, June 8th, the sky looked even worse, and by the time I woke up there were already reports pouring in that the AQI (air-quality index) was spiking higher and higher. By then, the smoke had actually seeped into the house I live in. It wasn’t terrible, but it was there — certainly enough to give you a sense of being slowly encroached-on by imminent danger. By then, New York City was also badly affected, and so the story was buzzing all over the country, the world and, of course, the internet.
If you go to the AirNow.gov site the scale they use is as follows: an index above 150 is classified as “unhealthy”; an index above 200 is classified as “very unhealthy” and above 300 is officially “hazardous.” According to reports in the Rochester daily newspaper The Democrat & Chronicle as well as The New York Times, the AQI here tipped past 300 that day — and over 400 in Syracuse, just an hour and a half east of me. By then, of course, the tone of the local weather forecast I watch had grown more urgent, but not by much. And school hadn’t been called off either — only outdoor activities were cancelled.
A friend of mine who works as a special-education assistant at a school here texted me to let me know that kids were throwing up, and that the nurse was besieged with kids complaining that their stomachs hurt. Worse, my friend told me that, because the air system at his school had been modified to draw-in more air after COVID, the entire school was filled with smoky air. Meanwhile, my daughter’s mother texted to say she was considering evacuating for a few days and taking our daughter out of town just to be on the safe side. The question, though, was: How far would she have to drive to reach safety? And just how bad was the danger? Were we just sitting ducks? Or would this blow over?
Much like I’d felt leaving the Radiohead show, my concern wasn’t unbearable, and I kept it together. The air, in fact, cleared later that evening, only to get worse again the following day and then clear once again. Since then, there haven’t been any known air-quality issues where I live, but the forecast for this coming weekend calls for more smoke issues as "multiple active out-of-control wildfires continue to burn."
Of course, some pressing questions remain: What if this becomes a regular occurrence? And what if it’s worse next time? It really wouldn’t have taken much for the air to simply be un-breathable. And then what! It’s like we got right to the edge of a precipice. Going over the edge of that precipice is unthinkable, but clearly this isn’t a time for the “freeze” part of “fight, flight or freeze”…
As you can probably tell, this was the closest I’ve ever come to a potential emergency on this scale. I know people in California have had to contend with this kind of thing for years, but this was really unsettling. And as the shadow of disaster darkened the front door, I took inventory of everything that’s taken place since that drive back from the concert in 2001. The future I could sense on the horizon — the reality that we long thought of as “not too distant” but still yet to come — has arrived in full force.
Over the last three years, we’ve slipped into a dystopia so pervasive it takes my breath away to think of how quickly it snapped into place and wedged its tentacles into the ground (gradually, as the saying goes, and then all at once). Meanwhile, the official government messaging on an array of threats — COVID, the Ukraine war, UFOs and (increasingly) artificial intelligence — has become a daily onslaught. Not to say that any of those things aren’t threats, but it’s hard to ignore the sense that fear is being stoked in us from every direction on purpose, like a campaign to keep the public as on-edge as possible.
Why, for example, is the mainstream media being flooded with stories about the threat of UFOs and AI when it’s not like those are exactly new developments? Why now? Not to mention the relentless gaslighting and propagandizing. By virtue of just waking up in a modern setting today, one encounters a seemingly endless stream of psychological button-pushing so brazen and perverse it would make George Orwell and the characters from the movie Brazil blush. Over the last several months in particular, it takes the determination of a tightrope walker in a blinding snowstorm to keep one’s balance…
I am not, by habit, prone to indulging in doom porn. I remain unwavering in my stance that humanity has the capacity to navigate forward through the treacherous waters we find ourselves — indeed, put ourselves — in. But we can no longer deny that it’s time to make some changes. I sense that it will get only more and more clear — painfully so — that it’s no longer sustainable to just keep letting ourselves get herded into danger by faceless, ungainly forces that either don’t have the capability or the interest in preserving our well-being.
I can’t stand it, though, when I hear people gripe endlessly about forces bigger than us who have us trapped. As far as I’m concerned, no form of power exists without our permission. We are, by nature, a collective species. If some of us have concentrated more power in their hands, it’s because the rest of us actively (if unconsciously) conspired to let them do it. This outlook keeps me unequivocally hopeful about our future, because it places decision-making in our hands rather than “theirs” (whoever “they” might be).
So I would offer that "something has to change” but the fact is, for better or worse: everything is changing already. Whatever it is that I saw in that cloud is here. I wonder what we’ll make of it.
<3 SRK