Bay Area | Bay State Deja Vu

These last few days in Boston the humidity was the thing I kept complaining about, heavy and slow, the kind of air that follows you inside and just sits there. I figured that was the story of the week. Then Tuesday afternoon I looked up, and the whole sky had gone orange.

I grabbed a few photos on my walk through downtown, still not quite believing it.

Boston photos above are mine, shot downtown this week.

But the strange part was not the sky itself. It was that I had seen this exact sky before.

A few years back I was living in San Francisco, going to USF, when the whole city turned an intense shade of orange. Wildfire smoke had settled over everything; the middle of the day looked like dusk on some other planet. Mad Max references were not in any shortage that day thats for sure! One image in particular got very popular around USF since Complex had shared the image of St Ignatius that morning.

I did not save my own shots from that, but Complex captured it perfectly, in a set photographed by Nils Gilman. Worth the click if you want to see what San Francisco looked like that day.

San Francisco photos by Nils Gilman, shared by Complex. Linked above, not reproduced here.

So there I was in Boston, a whole country and a whole life change away from that version of me, feeling the same small drop in my stomach, the same dim little sun, and sepia light on the buildings. I found out later this orange was smoke too, drifting all the way down from fires up in Canada until it parked over New England. My girlfriend was the first one to point it out, but I didn't even think about what was causing it.

Strangely enough, when I mention to people that I moved here from San Francisco, the first thing they say is that the two cities are actually quite similar. At first that sounded absurd to me, two places that could not feel further apart. It is becoming more obvious the more time I spend here. The water on every side, the walkable little neighborhoods, and now, apparently, a sky that knows how to turn orange.

Maybe that is the strange comfort of moving somewhere new. You keep bracing to feel like a stranger, then the sky does something you have seen before, and for a moment the new place and the old one feel like the same story.

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