Where I live, on the edge of the Columbia River, in southern Washington State, the light is yellow and strange, scattered by the thick smoke of a wildfire about twenty miles downstream. The Eagle Creek fire, which started last Saturday afternoon, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, quickly spread over more than thirty thousand acres of dizzyingly steep terrain; as of Thursday morning, it was only five per cent contained. Over the holiday weekend, the fire trapped a hundred and forty day hikers on a popular trail, obliging them to spend a cold, hungry, and terrifying night in the woods. It has since forced about seven hundred people to evacuate their homes, and hundreds of others to prepare to leave on short notice. Some of the most beloved outdoor spots in the Pacific Northwest are in the path of the blaze. Already, the region has begun to mourn the transformation of its waterfall-fringed forests of Douglas fir and hemlock.

My neighbors and I are lucky: we haven’t been evacuated, and we don’t expect to be. At this distance, we face not mortal threats but inconveniences and oddities. Sticky white ash coats the laundry outside, packages are delayed, major roads are closed, and outdoor recess is cancelled. The sunrises and sunsets are lurid. The streets are unusually quiet—everyone is staying inside as much as they can—but the smoke sneaks around windows and doors, and the smell is inescapable. We cough and rub our eyes and hope for the wind to stop.

Smoke from a wildfire blankets Deschutes National Forest, in central Oregon. Photograph by Fedor Zarkhin / The Oregonian via AP

I’ve lived in rural parts of the western United States for the past twenty years, and every summer has had its smoky spells, some more than others. I know people who have lost their homes to wildfire, and I know what I would take from mine if I had to evacuate. Fire is part of most of the region’s forests, and as such it’s an occasional part of our lives, too. But wildfires are bigger and more destructive than they used to be, and the fire season now stretches beyond the summer and well into the school year—in some places, even nudging into what we used to think of as winter. Climate change, combined with a century of overenthusiastic fire suppression and the resulting buildup of fuel, has turned the once occasional emergency of wildfire into a chronic condition.

The smoke that lies so heavily on my town is mostly from the Eagle Creek fire, but some of it surely comes from the dozens of other wildfires under way in the Pacific Northwest. In early August, we were wreathed in smoke from British Columbia; in late August, it was coming from central Oregon. As of Thursday, seventy-six fires were burning over a million and a half acres of the western U.S., and a hundred and thirty-nine were burning in British Columbia, which is suffering its worst fire season on record. So much ash has rained down on Portland and Seattle that many residents are recalling the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Like Atlantic hurricanes, our wildfires are now overlapping, with little or no relief between; on Monday, when a friend posted on Facebook that he was “doing fine,” another asked, “Sorry, but which disaster are you in?”

The Eagle Creek fire was apparently started by a fifteen-year-old boy from Vancouver, Washington, who on Saturday afternoon was seen lobbing a smoke bomb from a hiking trail into the steep basalt ravine cut by Eagle Creek. Liz FitzGerald, a Portland woman who witnessed the incident, told me that the boy was part of a group of about a dozen teen-agers, and that his friends looked on, some giggling, as the firework dropped into the two-hundred-foot-deep canyon. “Don’t you know how dangerous that is?” FitzGerald told them. “This whole place is so dry!” They shrugged.

FitzGerald continued up the narrow trail, but after a few minutes realized that she should heed her own warning; when she turned back, she saw that the thin plume from the smoke bomb had already thickened into something more threatening. She ran the mile and a half to the trailhead, and when she passed the group of teen-agers, she told them that they had started a forest fire. “What are we supposed to do about it now?” one said. “Call the freaking fire department!” FitzGerald replied.

In the trailhead parking lot, FitzGerald told a Forest Service law-enforcement officer what she’d seen, and, as they talked, she noticed that the teen-agers had reached their own vehicle and were already pulling out onto the highway. The officer, with FitzGerald in tow, gave chase and stopped the alleged perpetrator; charges have not yet been filed, but an investigation is ongoing. Social media has since lit up with fury at the bomb-thrower, but FitzGerald points out that the entire group of teen-agers—and a number of passing adults—watched his actions and did nothing. “Everyone wants to just nail this kid, but so many people saw this crazy behavior,” she said. “They were all complicit.” Five days later, the smoke has settled in—a stinking, gritty reminder that the rest of us are complicit, too.