AmeriCorps 2020: Smokescreen

This is the latest post about my 2020 AmeriCorps term in Boulder, Colorado. The rest of this series is located here.

August 13, 2020

When I arose on August 13, 2020, something had changed. While the morning air at the Joder homestead usually had a slight chill to it, today it was downright cold. As I sat on the stone patio of the Joder house enjoying my morning coffee, I had to wear a t-shirt, a flannel, a fleece, and a beanie.

But there was another change in the air that would prove to be more significant.

The air on the morning of August 13 had a distinctive haze to it. No matter where I looked, everything was fuzzy, as if I was looking through a fine, grey screen.

That screen was wildfire smoke. Colorado was dealing with its worst fire season ever, with fires burning throughout the state. Some of the smoke had settled around Joder Hill, saturating the air around our house.

Everything remained “off” for the rest of the day. My routine didn’t change: I rode through Boulder with my work crew in our ancient van until we reached the location of the Fern-Mesa reroute project. Once there, my fellow AmeriCorps members and I unloaded our tools, hiked to our worksite, and began shaping the budding trail.

Nothing differed about our work that day, either; we continued smoothing out the new Fern-Mesa trail and its backslope, as we’d done many times before. But I didn’t feel like myself.

I was inexplicably tired all day. Every action was effortful, including eating, and I couldn’t finish my lunch.

We thankfully returned home that afternoon, but our day wasn’t done. We had to make dinner and do chores, and I got stuck cleaning the kitchen with my friend Maggie. Normally I’d enjoy doing anything with Maggie, but I was so tired that day that I could barely function.

At the time, I didn’t know why I felt so exhausted, but when I look back it’s easy to see a connection. August 13, 2020 was the first day that we had to deal with serious wildfire smoke. I spent the whole morning outside, inhaling coffee and smoke in equal measure, and then I felt terrible for the rest of the day. I know that correlation isn’t causation, but it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room; or, in this case, the raging fires of the apocalypse.

Over the coming weeks, the nearby wildfires would become more of an issue, until they eventually threatened our ability to remain in Colorado.