“Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing…” – Jack London, The Call of the Wild

I realized recently how much I love going outside when I couldn’t go outside.

I couldn’t go outside because I live in Chicagoland, and the other day we had, by far, the worst air quality in the world. The AQI was at nine hundred million billion zillion or some such number.

The air was truly toxic and as soon as you stepped outside, as soon as you stepped outside, you knew it.

It was like a yellow and grayish toxic fog of smudge filling the air everywhere that made your lungs burn. The dogs, too, started coughing. You literally could not stay outside unless wearing a mask, and last time I checked, dogs can’t wear masks, thus, you had to take them out quickly to do their business (if you have dog/s) and then right back inside.

It was wildfires from Canada, hundreds of miles away, that were causing this dystopian, toxic situation.

The smoke blew down from there to here, mixed with the city air and the 105-degree F “real feel” temperature, and created the toxic air.

Even the professional baseball games were canceled. All the Lake Michigan beaches (28 straight miles of free public beaches in the city of Chicago alone) were closed.

I am not a person who needs a mountaintop, a seashore, or a desert on a daily basis, although I have been known to travel to those kinds of places frequently in the past, and I go down to visit Lake Michigan pretty frequently. (Lake Michigan is 307 miles long and 118 miles wide at its widest, with a maximum depth of over 900 feet: i.e., an inland sea, connected to four other inland seas and forming the Earth’s largest fresh water system, or 20% of the world’s surface fresh water. There will be a lot of people trying to move to this area by the end of the century.)

But all I need on a daily basis is some trees (or even one tree), some flowers, some grass (or snow in winter), a few parks, or the local, humble forest preserves, which look modest and are actually filled to overflowing with such creatures as: frogs, toads, snakes, turtles, bees, beetles, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, other insects, hawks, herons, ducks, geese, song birds, other birds, deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, river otters, muskrats, and even some beavers. And even the fish in the river must’ve been coughing during the latest Toxic-Sludge-Air Event. (Hemingway roamed this area as a teenager and John Wayne Gacy dumped bodies into this river 25 miles upstream which, to me, shows the best and the worst of humanity all coming together at the river.)

And when you can’t go outside, you start to get cabin fever. (Or: when I can’t go outside, I start to get cabin fever.)

Cabin fever usually denotes not being able to go outside because it’s too cold and there’s too much wind and snow; but now it also means not being able to go outside because when you do, it makes your eyes and your lungs burn, your hair and clothes smell like smoke, your healthy adult dogs cough, and the fact that it’s hard to breathe out there starts giving you the fantods (and the heebie-jeebies) because there’s an onslaught of toxic particles infesting your lungs and eyes – literally, seriously; like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story (not exaggerating here) and that self-admitted weird guy could really make up some creepy stuff. Weird Tales, indeed.

If you start feeling like you’re in the middle of an H.P. Lovecraft short story and it’s real life, do something!

I suggest putting your mind above it all, like Jesus on the cross (even though there’s also a time to shout out, “Why have you forsaken me!?”).

Sitting Bull used to sit down in the middle of bullets whizzing all around his head, pack his pipe calmly, and sit there smoking his pipe, calmly, while all the bullets continued whizzing around his head.

No one knows why, but all the bullets missed, all of the times, except once when he was younger, and at the end.

And I realized that when I can’t go outside, I start to go insane.

Then we had a Noah’s Ark and the Rainbow moment here.

I woke up today and the sky was blue and clear, and the air was okay again, just like that: and the temperature was perfect enough at a “real feel” of just 90 degrees F.

When I was a little kid, about fifty years ago (I’m 59 now), 90 degrees F was VERY HOT and very rare.

Now it’s normal for a midsummer day here in the middle of the American Midwest in the middle of North America. Just like tornadoes and floods are much more common here in Illinois now, and in the wintertime we sometimes get a thing called “thundersnow” (thunder storms and snow simultaneously) which is a thing that did not even exist around here at all when I was a kid. The first time I saw it I was so flabbergasted and amazed that I felt like Moses on a mountaintop being shown the Burning Bush almost.

And I still love, as do my dogs, going outside.

Crucial Dog Notes: I have the dogs for a literal multitude of reasons, one of them being that I don’t get along with the vast majority of herd humanity very well on a face-to-face basis most of the time because they give me the fantods and the heebie-jeebies (the people I do get along with I get along with fine, and very well, usually) which is why I always appear to be running away from people or hiding and lurking behind doors, like Emily Dickinson; or faithfully wearing my sunglasses, like Lightnin’ Hopkins or Jeffrey Lebowski; and another of those huge, crucial reasons is that we all love going outside together so much.

END NOTE: The wildfire smoke is back today (but not as bad).

Dr. Dale W. Barrigar

(Images by DWB)