The bus driver in Portland who pointed out the ash layer

Last month I was riding the 4 bus and this driver, older guy named Ray, looked at the dry hills and said "see that gray dust on everything? That's not just dirt, that's layers of fires we keep stacking." He told me he's been driving 20 years and the summer smoke used to be a week, now it's half the season. It stuck with me because he wasn't angry, just tired, like he'd watched the calendar shift in real time. Has anyone else had a random stranger put the weight of this into plain words like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

lilyp3729d ago

Honestly @daniel140, I never saw it that way until Ray said it, but now I can't unsee it either.

daniel1401mo ago

My uncle Frank, who worked highway maintenance for 30 years in eastern Oregon, said the same thing last summer while we watched the sky turn orange. He just pointed at the ash on his windshield and said "I used to clean this off once a year, now I keep a bottle of washer fluid in my trunk at all times." There was something about him saying it so plain, like he was talking about changing the oil, that hit harder than any news report I've seen. It's the daily grind folks who notice the slow changes first, you know, because they're out in it every single day.