The Borrowed Sky

I picked a poor week to become a responsible runner.

With a few races on the horizon (and a very real struggle session of a half marathon last weekend), I had finally decided this was it. No more “eh, I’ll just wing it.” Time to get back on the trails and train. I have actual races this fall. Future Me would surely appreciate that Present Me had finally gotten her act together.

The atmosphere had other plans.

Much of southeastern Wisconsin, along with large swaths of the Midwest, has spent the week under the worst air quality we’ve ever recorded. The Air Quality Index sits at 413 while I am writing this. For context, anything under 50 is considered good. Over 300 is hazardous. The previous record for the Milwaukee area, set in 1987, was 300.

Wowza.

Leave it to me to choose the exact week the sky became poisonous.

Fortunately, at this time, the fires themselves are not local to us. Unfortunately, that we are seeing it here means that the fires raging in Northern Minnesota and Canada just that intense so as to cause these record-breaking problems miles away. And fires like this are becoming more and more commonplace.

Oddly enough, it reminded me of something I’d never really considered before: I always thought of the sky as local. Wisconsin has Wisconsin weather. Nothing beats a Wisconsin winter sunrise, or a Wisconsin summer sunset over a lake. Sure, other places have their skies, but we have ours and it is special.

But that’s not really how this works.

The haze of this weird, dry fog crossed forests, lakes, highways, provinces, and state lines before settling over my intended morning run.

Photo of smoke in the Milwaukee area. Photo credit: Fox 6 Milwaukee

It’s a reminder that the atmosphere doesn’t recognize borders. It doesn’t pause at customs; it doesn’t care where Wisconsin ends and Ontario begins. The wind simply picks things up and carries them until they become someone else’s problem.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. This isn’t “someone else’s problem.” It’s just a problem because we are all in this together. It’s ours, the collective ours. While rangers are evacuating campers from the Boundary Waters, volunteer organizations in Wisconsin are handing out N95 masks to people who can’t stay indoors this week. Two very distinct activities, but all a part of the same big bad whole. The danger doesn’t distinguish between us, and neither does the need to help each other through it. When our neighbors suffer, we suffer too. When they feel pain, we feel it too.

Oof. Calling that a metaphor for times like these would be a little too on-the-nose. But that’s sort of an inescapable conclusion, isn’t it?

We spend so much time drawing lines on maps, my problem versus not my problem, that it’s easy to forget nature never signed the agreement. Everything from rivers to birds to clouds know this - how did we forget? Or why do we choose to ignore such a simple truth?

I just wanted to go for a run - I didn’t mean to stumble into an existential crisis. Maybe that’s why this week of non-running is staying with me more than I expected. It wasn’t just a reminder that the sky isn’t ours. It was a reminder that maybe nothing ever was.