New Mexico is currently under siege. We are being assaulted by the smoke from the Arizona "Wallow" Fire. As much as I'm about to complain about it, let it be known that I am much more worried for the people being truly affected by the fire than I am for the safety of my weak, little lungy-poos. With that said, for the last week, I feel like I've been living in the middle of a campfire.
The first night the smoke came over Albuquerque, I hadn't even heard that there was a fire. I started smelling smoke, so much that I thought there was a fire in my neighborhood. I walked outside to find that there was smoke surrounding my house. In high school, I lost a friend to a house fire, so I don't take smoke lightly. My grandmother, who lost a family member in an eerily similar incident (granted about 75 years previous to my friend's), actually began feeling the walls in her house to see if they were hot. I immediately checked the news websites, and couldn't find anything, so what's the next logical move? Facebook, of course. Sounds ridiculous, but our society has become so accustomed to immediacy, Facebook and Twitter are the easiest way to find out current affairs. You don't agree? I found out about Osama bin Laden's death via Facebook long before I saw it on CNN.
What do you know... my inquiry about whether there was a fire in our neighborhood was met with responses from friends all over the city. Smoke was EVERYWHERE. The idea that smoke from another state (one that takes a good 3 to 4 hours to get to from Albuquerque) is insane to me. The smoke is almost as intense as it was when I lived in San Diego during the fires in 2003 (which is really saying something).
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| Here's an unedited shot from my backyard. The camera doesn't capture how thick the smoke was right in front of me. |
Suffice it to say, the last couple weeks in Albuquerque looked like something out of a sci-fi flick. Anyone who has been to Albuquerque knows that we have the beautiful 12,000 ft. Sandia Mountains to the east, which can be seen from anywhere in town. The smoke covered the mountains so completely, you'd never be able to tell they even existed.
With all the natural disasters going around, I hope that those of us who are only affected indirectly remember to think about all the people displaced, injured and killed.
Here's to a week with better air quality.
