The Smoke
Tuesday 6.6.23
As I exited the door of the building and walked out onto the sidewalk, an unexpected smell reached my nose - smoke. I guess I’ve encountered this from trips out west because it smelled strangely familiar, or, if not from a roadtrip perhaps from campfires. The smell was the same: burning wood. Millions of acres of trees are burning across Canada and a cold front is moving the smoke cloud south across the United States. The next thing I noticed after the smell was the eerie gray sky. The time was approximately 8pm. There was no sunset. Just a decreasing grayness and then darkness. Earlier in the day the sun cast a hazy orange glow through the smoke and the smell wasn’t as perceptible. As I walked home, a brisk wind rustled the trees and blew dust across Morgan Avenue.
Is this what it’s like walking in the apocalypse?, I wondered. I felt exposed, vulnerable, in shorts and a t-shirt without protective clothing, eyewear and mask to shield myself from the toxic air. In recent years, wildfires on the west coast also brought hazy clouds to the city but I haven’t experienced this degree of smoke in New York City where I’ve lived all my life. Back at my apartment, I closed the windows to prevent the harmful smoke from entering and showered to clean my skin.
The pale gray skies and wildfire smell in the air prompted my memory of another peculiar environmental phenomenon: The Invasion of the Spotted Lanternflies.
During the summer of last year (and possibly earlier) our entire area was under occupation by a unfamiliar foe: lycorma delicatula, a dark colored, winged insect originating from China commonly known as the lanternfly. They are easy enough to spot due to their dark color and the by the middle of the summer they seemed to be everywhere. The professionals informed us that committing mass genocide on this species was the only way to protect our precious fauna lest they be reduced to a pile of sawdust by the invading army.
Citizens took to their phones, sharing ways to capture and kill our enemy. The remains of murdered lanternflys littered the sidewalks. At first I refrained from murder. I was unfamiliar with my opposition. I had never seen this species before, this insect which was foreign to our ecosystem, an intruder. One day last summer I was sitting in my car and noticed that the bark of a nearby tree looked alive, was moving. Closer inspection revealed a horde of lanternflies devouring the defenseless tree. I vowed to take action and join my neighbors in stomping the flies - this was war. For the first time in my life I had definitive proof of an abnormality in the environment. This gave me great pause.
As I walked home yesterday in the dusty, breezy, weird gray pall of smoke and thought about the future climate apocalypse, I saw people riding bikes or walking to their destinations. A band played inside a crowded bar. I remembered that though it may be near the end of the world, we’re still just normal people going about our day because what else is there?
