I woke up at dawn with a headache, and I knew the reason before I even picked my aching head up off the pillow. The wildfire smoke had made its way up to Park City. I looked at my phone and it said the AQI was 116. When I zoomed out on the weather map, it showed a bright orange blob hovering over town. But I didn’t need a weather app or even a headline to know what was going on. The headache was enough. I went outside with the dog. It was a little after 5:30 and all was eerily silent. Not a car or person in sight. Just a few birds calling out to each other that they’d made it through the night. As I rounded the block, even the 7-Eleven seemed as frozen in the moment as an Edward Hopper painting. The sky was blurry and slightly tinged with gold. In the distance, I could see Deer Valley, the mountain softened behind a thin veil of smoke. If it wasn’t so ugly, it would have been beautiful. The wind swirled around me, picking up my hair and blowing my pajama pants like telltale streamers on a boat. I felt oddly misplaced, wondering if the wind was helping or hurting. The smoke was here, but the fire was far away. And it would go away eventually. I stood there on the sidewalk longer than I needed to. Even my dog seemed to understand the pause as I strained to sense the wind like a sailor reading the sea. If it blew east, maybe it would carry the smoke away. If it shifted, maybe it would bring even more to us. I had no idea. The mountains looked close enough to touch and impossibly far away at the same time. As long as there was a ridgeline between me and the flames, I could keep telling myself that the fire was happening somewhere else. It had to be. It started to feel like winter all over again when most of us told ourselves, This is just one bad snow year. Next season will be better. This can’t be the new normal. Only, on that morning, the thoughts I had were more like: The smoke will dissipate. The wind will calm down. The fire will be contained. It has to. I saw a reel on Instagram that had seemingly been shot from a hospital bed in Huntsman Cancer Institute. Just outside the window was apocalyptic horror. The mountainside was ablaze. Smoke exploded into the sky. A helicopter buzzed by, dumping chemicals in a bright red plume. Pure chaos, just yards away. Yet, the person behind the camera observed the scene as calmly as they might had they been watching from a plush velvet seat at the Cineplex. Maybe they believed what I believe. The firefighters would hold the line. The helicopters would have enough fire retardant to contain it. The mountain would somehow remain a mountain. Everything would be OK. It had to. They’d all come to stand for something else I could sense in my body as readily as the wildfire smoke entering my bedroom. Safety. The mountain meant distance. As long as there’s a divide between us and the flames, it somehow felt like the danger belonged to someone else. The aircraft is a sign of human ingenuity. The belief that if we just invent enough tools, we can outrun catastrophe. And the firefighters stand for something even deeper — our faith in one another. That when the unimaginable happens, ordinary people will run toward it as the rest of us watch from a distance. Maybe that’s what faith looks like in this vulnerable world. The mountain will hold, the machines will work and someone else will stand between us and the fire. They have to. Especially the next time the smoke finds its way into your bedroom. The post Betty Diaries: The wind and the wildfires appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less