Mike Drew: Making the best of a hazy situation

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I could taste the smoke.

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It was sour, acrid, nasty stuff and every time I opened my mouth it flooded in and set off the bitterness sensors on my tongue. There was no way to avoid it, no way to keep it at bay. Even driving with the windows rolled up and the fan set to recirculate the air in the truck, the taste was still there.

We’d mostly been able to avoid the smoke until early this week, unlike the poor folks who live farther north and closer to the fires and especially those who have been displaced by them, but a sudden shift in the wind had swept it down onto us.

Now our world was shrouded in a dirty yellow-grey miasma that obscured the sky and curtained the horizon. It burned the eyes and clawed at the throat and tasted horrible. And there was no way to escape it.

So instead, I embraced it.

Nasty though it was, that smoke in the air was softening the light and infusing it with a warmth that daylight, especially midday light, doesn’t usually have. All those microscopic particles suspended in it scatter and diffuse the incoming rays and allow them to wrap themselves around whatever they hit.

Even at midday — which is when I hit the road — highlights become softer, shadows lose their hard edges. The top of the smoke layer absorbs most of the colder-toned, blue wavelengths of the sunlight hitting it while the warmer reds, yellows and oranges are able to push their way through.

The result is that, even though I had started shooting pictures right around lunchtime, the light was as soft and warm as it would have been closer to dusk or dawn on a non-smoky day. Tragic though the source of all this diffusion was, the effects of it were kinda lovely.

It was easy to see at the first place I stopped. Though I could barely see for a few hundred metres down the length of it, the pond I was at was lit by nearly shadowless light. The old leaves on the cattails glowed especially bright in the smoky light while the greens around the shore and among the willows and aspens looked dark and rich.

The old grey branches on drowned willows took on a creamy tone and even the white wimples under the chins on the Canada geese honking near a nest had an orange tinge. The waves on the wind-blown water sent yellow reflections of the bright disc of the sun overhead chasing each other across the surface.

I always wonder how the non-human world reacts to situations like this. I mean, the birds and animals have the same senses we do. They can smell the smoke, see the effect it has on the light, taste its bitterness. And they have even fewer ways to get away from it than we do.

But as I drove along, I saw little clay-coloured sparrows and bluebirds looking for bugs among the willows and tree swallows squabbling around nesting boxes. The gophers were up and running around the pastures. Cattle grazed placidly.

At another pond, I found trumpeter swans bobbing their heads and stirring up the mud on the bottom with their big feet to kick loose things to feed on. One seemed so oblivious to the smoke that it was sleeping. Down the road at a small dugout there were swallows snatching bugs out of the air over the water while a pair of Wilson’s snipes had an argument on the shore.

None of them seemed particularly bothered by the smoke at all.

I’d gotten farther north now, closer to the Dogpound Creek valley, and the wind was stronger. It sent the leaves on the poplars slashing across the sky in front of the sun’s orange disc and pushing waves of smoke that I could actually see wax and wane. Stopping along a sheltered roadway to shoot a patch of saskatoons that were coming into bloom, that rough wind did indeed shake those darling buds of May. Shook the amber-lit trunks of the aspens around them, too.

The warm light really added to the glow of all the yellow buffalo beans I found in a pasture and even though the smoke cut the view down considerably, it still enhanced the alternating lines of aspens and spruce closer to Water Valley.

But man, not only was the taste getting to me but the stinging in my eyes and throat was getting pretty bad. Stopping by the Little Red Deer River to look for an eddy where I could splash my face with cold water — stupidly didn’t bring any with me — I saw as I looked upstream that the rapids were crowned with bright copper.

OK, I’ll tough out the stinging eyes. I need a picture of that.

Shaggy whitetail deer in the Harold Creek valley west of Water Valley, Alberta, on Tuesday, May 16, 2023.

The Little Red didn’t really work out but its tributary, Silver Creek, did.

Down in the shaded valley, the copper sparkles stood out even more brightly so I took advantage of my long lens to throw them out of focus behind willow blossoms and fresh poplar leaves. I was out of the smoke a bit down there, too, and I could see tiny birds further up the creek. A squirrel chattered.

And the wind died.

Not completely but the smoky blast that I’d been in all afternoon dropped off to a light breeze and the smoke began to act more like fog. It drifted now, filling in the dips in the land and rolling away from the ridges. It still surrounded me and still tasted terrible but it felt softer, less mean than it had when the wind was blowing.

So I decided to continue on westward up the Harold Creek valley.

I wasn’t sure what I would find up that way, whether the smoke would be heavier as I got closer to the mountains, but it’s such a lovely place that I figured it was worth a look. Besides, it was getting on to supper time now and the sun was beginning to add its evening warmth to the light already tinted amber by all the smoke.

No matter what I found, it would look even better as the evening wore on.

And it did. The beaver meadows on the east side of the ridge were a mosaic of greens and golds with blue haze spreading out into the side valleys. The sun hung like a golden shield over the pines and spruce on the ridges. But the best things were the reflections.

There is a set of beaver ponds right beside the road in the upper creek valley and by the time I got there the wind had dropped to barely a whisper. There was smoke there but like back along Silver Creek, it was thinner down in the valley in front of me but still heavy overhead. But now the sun was at an evening angle to everything. And it was reflecting off the beaver ponds.

It was like looking at molten gold in some spots or copper in others depending on the colour of the water. I angled myself so I could shoot downward on the reflections with bits of willow and other shoreline shrubs in the foreground and every picture was different.

Sometimes little bubbles floated by which gave the reflections a textured look, other times ripples sent molten sparkles rolling along. The ambers, golds and yellows complemented the greens of the fresh willow leaves and grass floating out in the middle. A beaver swam by as I was shooting and then suddenly slapped the water with its tail when it noticed me. A spray of silver nuggets flew through the air.

Clouds were building up to the west and the light was dimming so I left the ponds behind and started heading back down the valley. The sun kept peeking through and posing behind stands of old trees while it cast shafts of amber light along the creek. Anticipating that it might look nice at the meadow where I’d stopped on the way up, I headed there for a last look on my way back to town.

There had been signs that there were wild horses around — poop piles — all along the road but I really hadn’t expected to see any. But as I came around the bend, there they were, a stallion, two mares and one baby. Their colours were a combination of each other, one mare a palomino, the other a creamy white and the stallion a kind of a buckskin/paint.

But the baby, the baby was different. Through my long lens, I could see that it had blue eyes and white lashes, a pink muzzle and a snowy mane. White horses are fairly common, even out here among the ferals. But this one, it might be an actual albino. Pretty interesting to see regardless.

I watched the horses for a while and then headed down the valley, passing deer along the road, crowds of crows and ravens along the ridges, geese on the ponds and more beavers that had come out to gather willows as the evening deepened toward night.

The smoke was still there, stinging my eyes and throat and burning my tongue. But there was still that smoky light, more blue now than gold with the sun behind the clouds and the mountain peaks.

But it still looked delicious.

If only it tasted that way.