Bay Area | Bay State Deja Vu

There are certain skies you do not forget.

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.

It did not clear overnight either. The next day the smoke was still hanging over the city, so I kept shooting, over in the North End and down by the Custom House.

Boston photos are mine, shot around the city these last couple of days.

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 this same shade of orange. Wildfire smoke had settled over everything, the middle of the day looked like dusk on some other planet, and nobody could quite believe what they were standing under.

The frame that always stuck with me was St Ignatius Church glowing under the haze, right on the campus I used to walk through every single day.

San Francisco photos by Nils Gilman, used with permission, originally shared by Complex.

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, the same sepia light on the buildings, the same quiet that falls over a city when everyone outside is looking up at the same thing. 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. But honestly the cause was never the part that stuck with me. It was the deja vu.

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. But it is starting to get more obvious the more time I spend here. The water on every side, the walkable little neighborhoods, the way the weather carries its own personality, 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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