The Fox Fire burns near Interstate 84 in eastern Baker County on July 27, 2026. I leaned over and squinted my astigmatic eyes to read the LCD numbers on the weather station. It showed 46 degrees, a figure I hadn’t seen there in a month or so. The wildfire smoke that had draped over the Baker Valley for the past two weeks or so had been temporarily banished along with the cloying heat. And the weather forecast was rife with two-digit figures starting with “9” — the numerical equivalent of a certain four-letter word.