The Humo

A few days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a dry, painful throat, a throbbing head and a queasy stomach. I was still half asleep, and I started to panic. At three in the morning, it seemed like a reasonable question: Has an entire city just died of smoke inhalation before?

The next morning I realized I was probably overreacting, but only by a little bit. The view out the window of the residencia dining hall right now looks a little bit like the view outside the window of our house in San Francisco in August. The apartment across the street looks washed out and almost blurry, like I'm looking at it through a cloud.

Which I am, basically. For the past four days, Buenos Aires has been covered in a massive, suffocating cloud of smoke so thick it's been causing accidents on the highways. The smoke comes from the countryside, where every year, farmers start fires to clear their fields. This year they got out of control.

I've heard several different reasons for why the smoke is so bad this year. The government is blaming the campo (translated as countryside, but used to mean farmers), saying that the fires are a form of protest since the paro didn't work. The campo, in turn, is blaming the government. They say the government started the fires to blame them on the farmers to make porteños less sympathetic to their cause. And then there are the natural explanations, which are probably at least partially true — the winds this year blew the smoke into the city with particular force and effectiveness, and there's no rain to wash it away.

I asked my tutor yesterday if the humo was normal. She said not really, but that strange things happen so often in Argentina that normal doesn't really mean anything at this point. Last week the whole city smelled like burnt garbage, because someone at the municipal dump decided it would be a good idea to try incinerating trash instead of burying it. The week before that (and the week before that) there was no meat, anywhere.

I just pretty much accept everything as an EC, but when I step back and think about it, it's just bizarre. It doesn't help that the smoke makes me think slower. Sometimes I feel like I'm dreaming.

I'm going out of town on Thursday, so I just have to make it until then without dropping dead of spontaneous lung cancer. Meanwhile, the government will blame the campo, the campo will blame the government, and we'll wait for the wind to change.