The Hills are on Fire

I live in Central Oregon.  I'm about a 30 minute drive (at 50mph because Oregon has ridiculous speed limits) from Sisters Oregon, which is basically on fire right now.  Or at least, the forest surrounding Sisters is on fire.  I have heard that certain sections of the town were evacuated at some point, but they've gotten that part of the burn contained by now, so the threat to the town is lower.

Anyway, we, in Bend Oregon, are directly down-wind from the blaze, and have been covered in a thick layer of smoke for about two weeks now.  Air quality was deemed hazardous in Sisters, and deemed very poor here.

You know that smell when you sit around a camp fire?  Or do a wood-burning barbecue, or even just a firepit?  That burning-pine smell?  It's nice in small quantities.  Not so nice when it lasts for two solid weeks and makes the air so thick with smoke that you can't see what's more than ten blocks away from any given point.  

I haven't seen the mountains on the horizon for two weeks, and today, I couldn't even see the Pilot Butte from my house, and I live pretty damn close to the Pilot Butte (Pilot Butte is an extinct volcano inside Bend's city limits).  You can pretty much see it from anywhere in town because... it was a volcano.  It's a "small" one, but it's still a volcano.

So yeah.  I wish we'd get some rain, or at least a really strong, consistent wind, to blow this damn smoke away.  From what I heard, after they got the portion of the fire heading towards populated areas, contained, they stopped efforts to fight the rest of it, and are just going to let it burn itself out until it rains.  Who knows how long that'll take - this region is called the "High Desert" for a reason - we don't get a lot of rain here.  

Fuck, wow - Okay, so I'm typing this on my laptop out in my backyard because my kids are playing in their sandbox right now.  I'm getting little flakes of ash on my screen right now, as I type.  

ASH.  On My Screen.

We aren't even close to the actual fire, but still we get to suffer from the shitty air quality.

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