There has been a lot of research in recent decades about the ways in which the weather can affect mental health. The diagnostic category, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), refers to a type of depression that seems to be set off by the weather patterns. It was first discovered in people who get depressed in the winter, when days are short and there is less sunlight. For some people, living in a place where it rains a lot and there are few sunny days during certain seasons, this can turn into a form of depression that interferes with their ability to work and function in their lives.

I’ve lived most of my life in pretty sunny places and haven’t felt the affects of the disorder, but I can tell when a perfectly beautiful day has lifted my spirits a bit, so I have a hint of what might be happening for those who suffer from the condition.

More challenging for me personally, I think, would be living in constantly smoky conditions. The northwest is filled with smoke this summer. Normally beautiful places have so much smoke that you can scarcely see the color of the sky. I know that the smoke comes and goes and that the wind can clear things up, but we had almost a whole day of driving in the smoke yesterday.

Being unused to traffic, we checked with locals and found that if we didn’t leave before 7 am, it probably made sense to wait until after 9. Leaving at 8 would get us through Seattle traffic at about the same time as leaving at 9. We took the advice and headed out at about 9:15 and had no problems with the traffic.

As we started down the east slope of the Cascades, we could see the smoke. By the time we hit the high desert at Ellensburg, it was very smoky. We drove across the Columbia Basin in the smoke, which persisted even after we got to Spokane and returned to the mountains. In Idaho there was an active fire quite close to the Interstate. At one point there was a hotshot crew working the fire from the road and there were signs telling us not to call 911 if we saw the fire - they are already working it. There is a very large fire camp at Wallace.

The smoke started to clear as we climbed up Lookout Pass into Montana, but there was still a bit of smoke in the air as we camped for the night in Western Montana. The entire states of Washington, Idaho and Montana are under complete burn bans. All of the campgrounds have signs about no campfires and urging campers to be especially careful with all fires and flames.

The camera normally cuts through the smoke. Smoke that is clearly visible to the human eye often isn’t recorded by cameras. It isn’t hard to photograph a plume of smoke, but a smoky sky often comes off as blue in a photograph. Still, when I snapped a photo of a wind farm with my cell phone as we ate our lunch, the smoke shows. It was even thicker than it appears in the photograph.

The calm conditions that allow the smoke to linger are rare in this part of the country. The Columbia Basin is often so windy that you notice it as you drive. Yesterday there were no problems with the wind. There was a kind of eerie feeling to the air. It was fairly warm, with temperatures in the high 80’s and 90’s as we drove across. But the lack of wind allowed the smoke and the field dust from the combines and other machines working the area to linger.

Crops don’t look so good in the basin. The grains are short and though harvest is mostly completed in the small grains, there are a few fields where they are swathing and picking up the grain to get what they can. The potatoes look pretty stunted for this time of the year and the field corn is short. The one crop that seems to be booming is alfalfa hay. That seems to be the big cash crop in the irrigated fields. There are huge warehouses of hay and most of the giant stacks are covered with tarps in that part of the country. Much of the hay is grown for export, filling empty shipping containers and providing feed for dairy cattle in Japan and China. It is a strange economy that allows for profit from shipping hay such long distances, but somehow it works out for the farms and for the importers.

The simple truth is that there are a lot of miles between our grandchildren and our home. A long day yesterday will be followed by a medium day today as we head for Red Lodge for a brief overnight visit with Susan’s sister before heading home tomorrow. It is a trip we’ve made many times before. When our son was a college student in Oregon, we made the trip at least twice each year and now that he is launched in his career we make a trip every year. With family in Montana, we usually stop to see my sisters one way and Susan’s the other, but there are variations on the trip. We’ve driven across Washington State on all of the major east-west routes: WA 20, US 2, Interstate 90 and US 12. Although we rarely stick to the Interstate on vacation, it turned out to be the practical way to make the miles yesterday.

A good night’s rest in a very comfortable campground, accompanied by our usual sounds of the highway and the railroad, and we’ll be able to get going early today. Part of the travel back home is making the mental adjustment from a vacation lifestyle to our work mode. There will be plenty of tasks to accomplish in the next few days to be ready for worship on Sunday and a return to our home life. It’s been a good trip and we need to pace ourselves to keep the energy to apply to the tasks at home.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.