Nightmare arrives 50 years later

This photo of mine led me to live without a car in Indianapolis for my entire adult life there. It is a photo of Long’s Peak, with Moraine Park in the foreground, in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. I took it in the early 1970s, developing the film and printing the photo in a makeshift darkroom set up in my windowless bathroom. Water was needed, and trying to seal out every speck of light wasn’t easy. Even the smallest leak meant ruined film and paper.

I’ve often used this photo and what it represents to explain the nightmarish vision I had of the mountains being hidden behind a cloud of smog. I wrote that vision shook me to my core at the time I first visualized what that would look like. And that vision has remained ever since. I couldn’t own a car, which would contribute to this environmental catastrophe.

Fifty years later, that nightmare arrived. These photos are of the closest thing to a mountain here in Madison, Wisconsin. Frederick’s Hill is in the Pheasant Branch Conservancy, just a couple of miles from where I’m living. Where I go several times every week to take photos.

These are both of Frederick’s Hill. The photo on the right was taken two days ago, when we were experiencing an awful air quality index of 250 from the smoke from the wildfires in Canada. The plot below is of the air quality index for Madison since June 1st. Today it is 56.

One might think this poor air quality coming from wildfires is not from fossil fuel emissions from cars, as I envisioned it in my nightmare. But it is, because the increased carbon dioxide levels result in higher air temperatures which result in drying out the land, grasses and trees.