Everything was hazy, unclear. The colors of the world around us changed. It was like living in an Instagram filter or a post-apocalyptic movie. The only thing that looked real was the sky. It was glowing bright orange. Not the orange of fire. It was more golden and admittedly, beautiful. We could actually look straight at the sun without it burning our eyes. Instead of white overpowering light, it was red, a dark red.
First, there was the wind. I was familiar with that because we get tornados in Indiana. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t frightening. I was in the ravine, a natural area running through the middle of campus when the wind first picked up. Small branches fell from the trees, and dust got in my eyes. It was less than an hour after that when the smoke first rolled in.
In Indiana, we rarely have wildfires, so when the smoke first settled on campus, I assumed it was simply fog. Enough so that when my friends told me to go inside, I informed them that this is not California and it was, at least mostly, water vapor that wouldn’t harm them. Then the sunset. I looked into a beam of light from the streetlamp and there I saw ash floating to the ground.
The next week or so was fairly bleak. All classes were virtual and most of campus was shut down. We couldn’t stay outside very long before our lungs started to burn. My friends and I started hanging out in Templeton to avoid contamination between dorms. Templeton is open all night for students studying late, or people who get locked out. That was good for a while, but the more the doors opened the more the smoke poured in.
The smoke got in some of the dorms too. The rooms that were empty had their windows open. It wasn’t long before you couldn’t see down the hallway. I was lucky. My roommate's mom was local and she bought us an air purifier.
We were all waiting with bated breath for rain. And, for a place which is so well known for its rain, it seemed to take forever to arrive. The next morning I opened up the weather and under the temperature, it didn’t say unhealthy air quality. It just said cloudy. It was over.
