What the Smoke Hid

Summer 2017, one of the worst fire seasons on record. Idaho was choking. Coeur d’Alene, McCall, Stanley, Boise, everywhere. The Boise valley filled with smoke so thick it swallowed everything behind these trees.

The previous summer I’d handed my company over to professional management, and for the first time in eighteen years I had my mornings free. I went hard at the foothills and the river with my camera. Discovering pieces of both places I’d driven past for decades without really seeing. This stretch of river was new to me. Shallow, tangled, a real mess of deadfall and branches. Ugly, if you looked at it straight on.

But the smoke did something to it. It obscured the background into a pale wall and let the foreground stand out clean and dark against it. Without that haze, this photograph doesn’t exist.

We’d been told the business was in good hands. Good numbers, good people, nothing to worry about. In the background, there were problems nobody mentioned. They would surface later.

I went back to this same spot that fall, once the smoke had cleared. The photograph didn’t work anymore. The black branches in the foreground matched the black branches behind them. You could see everything, and there was nothing to see.