Inches from a clean getaway

For our wedding anniversary this year, I bit the bullet and purchased an air purifier, the one most recommended on CBC's Marketplace, because summer smoke seems to be an annual menace in this benighted century.

So, naturally, we had no smoke this summer.  I was thinking about this, as I took a scenic route on the evening call to check on Demeter.  The slanting September sun looked particularly golden, and the flowers in the neighbourhood a wee bit dry.

About mid-morning today, I thought it was getting muggy.  Then the Resident Fan Boy, on an outing with younger daughter to Beacon Hill Park, texted me that the smell of smoke was strong.

The wind is blowing smoke from forest fires near Hope, B.C.

I hauled out the unopened box containing the new purifier, and set it up.  I'll then have to hurry over to Demeter's to make sure all her windows are closed.  Outside, the air is a light shade of umber, and I have errands to run.

No point in sighing.  I'll need to save my breath.

 

Muggy comfort

Heading through the amber-tinged streets this morning, I turned and saw the all-too-familiar blazing copper penny - for those of you who remember pennies - rising above the buildings.

Victoria has been largely spared the smoke from distant forest fires this summer, so much so that an editor, writing climate-change advice for the Times-Colonist earlier this week, reminded us of the "smoky skies over Victoria a few years back".  I guess he forgot about last September, when the smoke from California, Oregon, and Washington State clumped over Victoria for several days, turning the sun into a merciless, cold, silver disc, and hiking the air quality scale to "10+".  We were never given the actual number, but the air pollution was worse than that which plagues Beijing.

The air quality this time is a "moderate risk" 4; it was 6 yesterday evening.  It's a kind of cold comfort (well, muggy, anyway) that we are grateful to not be Beijing.

Or under a heat dome.  Seven weeks ago, I noticed the cat, splayed on the windowsill of our north-facing bedroom at 7 am.  Never a good sign.

It was a bit like the analogy of the boiling frog - each day, for about three days, it was a little bit hotter, so the night-time was not long enough to cool off, and we'd start each morning at a higher temperature, with a white-hot sun rising into the pitiless light-blue sky.

It was as if Hades had stalked us to the west coast:  the Ottawa-like social isolation brought on by the pandemic, and now, an Ottawa summer humidex in the mid 40's -- unheard of in Victoria. Butchart Gardens closed.  The University of Victoria closed.  Smaller businesses closed after midday.

On our wedding anniversary, I went to escort Demeter back to our place, and was smote by the heat whenever I stepped out of the shade.  It's a short walk, but my mother is 91, and using a walker.  We daren't jaywalk, so we had to make the loop to cross at the signals.  Demeter balanced an old-fashioned coolie hat on her head.  I learned later that, at that time, the temperature - not the humidex, but the actual temperature - was 39 degrees Celsius.  At 6 pm.  On Fairfield Road.  Eight blocks from the ocean.

Nope.  I'll take the blazing penny over a dome, any day.