Bad Air

Originally in MIchael Simms's excellent VOX POPULI, this little essay just won a Pushcart Prize

Bad Air –in mem. Creston MacArthur

Air quality poor today, the radio weatherman warns, but we’d have known that anyhow by this haze veiling the sun and the smoke from wildfires in the Maritimes draping itself along the highlands. All this is perversely lovely– and ghostly.

So old ghosts rise up. In mind, that is. And my very first thought is, The world is broken. I’m not sure at first why such a notion should spontaneously occur to me, can’t even quite say what I mean by it. Then I picture a dear lost mentor, Creston MacArthur, and my instincts immediately explain themselves. No doubt it’s the scent of smoke that had me thinking about the man without knowing it. When I was young, he and I would sit for hours by campfires.

Creston was a native of backwoods Maine, a logger, a guide, a brilliant raconteur in the minuscule town near our family’s fishing and hunting camp. Only seventy souls lived year-round in that hamlet, and I came to know each man and woman. My relations with them ranged from small talk to cherished friendship. Creston, however, became a second father to me after my own beloved father died in his middle fifties. I’m not just being folksy or sentimental when I say this man, so rudimentarily schooled, taught me more than the scores of professors I had in my own years of so-called higher education. I don’t mean only his lessons in woods and waters, fish and wildlife. No, he somehow just knew how to be in the world. Or so at least I believed back then.

In retrospect, I recognize that if anything, Creston had more reason to consider the world broken than I’ve ever had or ever will. He’d dealt with grinding poverty, backbreaking labor, the early loss of each of his five siblings except his valiant sister, who would actually outlive him by almost forty years, the severe cardiac illness of his only son. He’d watched thousands of acres of cherished forest devastated by industrial logging. He may well have wondered, as it’s easy for me to do in 2025 while witnessing a narcissistic criminal’s assaults on the nation and much of the world, his permission to ruinous polluters to ravage the planet however they choose– Creston may also have wondered why we humans can’t ever get things right.

And then, this second father also dropped dead in his middle fifties.

In his “Directive,” Robert Frost speaks of coming on a few shattered dishes beside a children’s collapsed playhouse in backcountry Vermont, where I’ve lived for decades now. On seeing these relics, the poet delivers a line that has always affected me: “Weep for what little things could make them glad.” Here, as smoky air surrounds us, I feel myself on the brink of tears to recall little things, some almost absurdly random, like the way Creston would stab a piece of meat on his plate, holding his fork straight upright in a fist as he sawed away with the sheath knife he’d carried since boyhood. Even the recollection of the knife’s dark blade, worn slim by years of whet-stoning, can choke me up.

Of course, there are less eccentric recollections to move me, like Creston’s funeral and burial, which took place not on a soupy August day like this but on a grim morning in February, the sky dropping rain, sleet, and sopping snow in that order. If my eyes were running then, it wasn’t because of smoke.

The organist played “Abide with Me” as the recessional, which racked me with further sorrow when we trudged toward the cemetery because Creston sang it so often as the glow of embers waned in this or that outdoor fire. He loved to sing, and although no one would call his voice operatic, it always seemed just right for the songs he favored. I can perfectly picture his face going red and his eyes widening with the high notes. He was obviously partial to “Abide with Me,” though he wasn’t much for religion.

Or did that fervor in his voice suggest that perhaps he was in his fashion? I never asked. There’s so much I never asked.

My own voice, so much weaker than once, would do that hymn no justice. I sing it to myself, in silence, as from fifty years ago I recall the clouds of snow –dense as this haze– blowing in from the lake, shrouding each headstone. The assembled mourners all wore rain gear, including me and the three other men who lowered that plain coffin into a muddy ditch.

Oh yes, now I knew the world was broken, all right, finished forever. And yet a mere whiff of smoke and here I am– talking about it again.