Why We Left Bend, Oregon
Climate change drove us out.
Rewind to a few years ago. One summer we escaped terrible wildfire smoke by driving all the way to Vancouver Island just to get away. Perhaps in the future, we thought, we could just jump into our truck and trailer and roll on out of town when the wildfires came. But pandemic fears has made us very cautious about traveling with so much uncertainty, and during the pandemic, our condo became our little fortress of safety from the virus.
Fast forward to this year. We survived a year without contracting COVID and managed to complete an extensive renovation of our condo, including installing a nice traditional cedar sauna in our bathroom and completely remaking and updating our kitchen. We entered 2021 determined to stay put. In early spring the prescribed burns started and we tolerated this as a necessary forestry practice. Our air conditioner failed just prior to the worse heat wave in the history of Oregon. The A/C condenser was backordered and wouldn't arrive for months. And then the wildfires started and we started to monitor the air quality index (AQI) every morning before going out to exercise. It just seemed like our terrific summers were being assaulted and we wondered: "Is this the new normal?"
We love our exercise. It's as necessary to us as food and water and air — clean air. While many dedicated individuals will exercise in poor air quality, we don't agree with the tradeoff and just don't exercise (or really even go) outside during bad AQI days. And because we are health science nerds we have filed away plenty of evidence implicating wildfire smoke in respiratory and other health conditions.
Why leave now? We saw the record heat wave and drought conditions portending worsening climate conditions in the Pacific Northwest. We foresee increasing late spring to fall wildfires and poor air quality as the new normal, and after some gnashing of teeth because we love our Bend friends, we decided to capitalize on the smoking hot real estate market and sell our condo.
While we prepared to sell our condo, we watched our beloved snowcapped Cascade Mountains turn brown. When we moved to Bend in 2012, the snow would remain, although patchy until September. This summer they were bare by mid-August. We watched as local reservoirs and lakes dropped to unusable levels. How do you celebrate summer in these conditions? How do you run, mountain bike, hike, or walk your dog when the air you are sucking into your lungs with each breath is unhealthy? Both of our eyes were red and irritated most of the summer. Robin began having some moderate breathing issues at AQIs above 100.
The day we drove out of Bend on September 4th and the AQI in Bend was 370 ppm. We arrived in Beaverton, Oregon and the AQI was 15 and woke up the next morning, breathed deeply, and went out for our morning exercise.