Smoke from a distant fire

You left me here on your way to paradise
You pulled the rug right out from under my life
I know where you goin' to I knew when you came home last night
'Cause your eyes had a mist from the smoke of a distant fire

You don't need a mellow rock song from the late 70s (take a bow, Sanford Townsend Band) to feel the smoke from a distant fire. It's tough not to notice how nasty the air is in the Twin Cities right now. There's been an acrid haze for the better part of a week,  as smoke from forest fires in Saskatchewan billows into town:

The worst of the air hung over a large swath of Minnesota from the south to Duluth and a pocket along the northeast border for much of Monday, gradually shrinking and lessening by mid-evening.

On an air-quality scale that ranges from 0 to 200, some parts of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities, pushed into the mid-170s and 180s, said Steve Mikkelson, a spokesman for the MPCA.

“That’s unusually high,” Mikkelson said, pointing out that he hasn’t seen readings this high for more than a decade. “We’ve had alerts in the ‘unhealthy for everyone’ range of the scale before, but not this high.”

Hazing

We often talk of air quality, but frankly, there is no air quality right now. I took this picture up at Interstate Park in Taylors Falls on Saturday. It was a beautiful summer day, but it didn't seem like it. It's been difficult to spend much time outside at all the last few days. I'm lucky because I rarely have any respiratory problems, so I would imagine that a lot of other people who ordinarily do have such issues are really suffering right now. If you have asthma, it's downright dangerous at the moment.

We got a lot of rain yesterday, around 3 inches at my house, but even that didn't clear the air. In fact, the air was worse yesterday afternoon on my commute home. You could barely see the skyline from Lake Street as I was driving north on 35W.

The local meteorologists are hoping that things will begin to clear today or tomorrow. I sincerely hope so. While such conditions wouldn't faze someone from Los Angeles, or Beijing, it's highly unusual for this area. It's easy to take things for granted, but the discomfort I'm feeling at the moment is a reminder that things could be a lot worse, and are, for many people and many places.