Now, seriously, did anyone expect this outcome?
Maddie Cole in eighth grade stopped running cross country. She’d competed the year before, but the
air quality in her native Sacramento was so bad that she got sick during a race; she soon learned she had asthma.
The next year the sky above Sacramento turned gray with smoke from
the 2018 Camp fire. Maddie and her classmates went to school with masks on. “It felt,” she said, “like a futuristic apocalypse.”
The situation has only worsened as wildfires and their devastation have become so routine that she and her classmates are “just used to it,” said Maddie, now 16 and a junior. This fall “it was just like, ‘Yeah, California’s on fire again. It’s that time of year.’”