ArcaMax

There's poison in the air outside my house, a bitter smoke of ashes and hot freeway, and it is keeping us all inside.

Yesterday morning, the kids' summer camp announced that the planned trip to the pool had been cancelled. They would do activities indoors all day.

"How high can it get?" one of the boys asked, and I admitted I didn't know.

We had gone through a stretch of bad air a few years earlier -- also due to invading smoke from Canadian wildfires -- and I remembered feeling worried back then, seeing numbers in the 180s. The air quality index for the town today showed 244.

The display in my phone's weather app included an air quality alert, and I checked it throughout the day, watching the AQI numbers tick up, representing how many foul particles were in the air.

The warning colors shifted from vermilion to violet to the deepest shade of blood red, nearly black, and after a day spent on computers, doing nothing more strenuous than typing and talking, my husband and I both had headaches.

I went to pick the kids up early and drove through a fog. In the 10 minutes it took me to get them, my eyes began burning. I scrambled through the car looking for old face masks.

My older son was making strange whooshing sounds when he got into the car.

"I'm doing my special breathing," he told me proudly. "I breathe the bad air out extra hard."

"You can put these on," I told the boys, offering them the masks helplessly. The plain surgical masks would do nothing, I had read online. The particles were small enough to get through the holes in the masks.

When we got home, I checked my weather app again and saw that the air quality for our town had become too poor to be measured by crude instruments. It had maxed out at 500.

I found a government air quality website -- one that, miraculously, hadn't been too defunded or destaffed to shut down -- and the radar showed a fat swoop of pollution cupping the lake. We were at 900 in parts of the area.

None of the sites had any information about what it could do to a child to breathe air like that, so I typed my question into an AI chatbot.

It expressed disbelief, admitting that such high levels had been noted before during brushfires in Australia and on terribly polluted days in Lahore, Pakistan. But in a tree-lined street in a suburb in the Midwest?

I asked it what the long-term health effects could be.

One day? Probably nothing, but who knows?

Prolonged exposure can lead to an increased risk of lung problems, heart problems,

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asthma.

As with the early days of COVID-19, scattered conservatives chafed at the restraints of Big Science. One regionally infamous chucklehead tweeted that he doubted there was much of a problem at all, and who'd ever even heard of an air quality index anyway?

I wished he'd shut up and take a long run along the lakefront.

I took the two air purifiers we had and put them in the same bedroom, letting the kids watch TV while I finished work. Every time I left the room, I could smell the smoke.

The president held a press conference to complain about attempted Chinese election meddling while he was in office, but he did not mention the air. There was no smoke in Washington or Palm Beach.

Our family ate dinner downstairs and, afterward, watched TV together in the master bedroom for a bit, as we normally do. My husband browsed air purifiers, industrial-sized ones that would clean larger spaces like the living room.

"This one will turn on automatically when it detects poor air quality," he said, showing me one model.

"Nice," I admitted, "but not essential."

One model required $99 replacement filters, which you had to switch out after periods of heavy use.

"The problem with all of these," my husband said as he scrolled, "is that none will get here in the next few days."

"Don't worry," I said, coughing. "This won't be the last time we'll need it."

COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.