This July, my family took a trip to Milwaukee. The evening we arrived, we took a walk to the shore. My three-year-old and his cousin ran around a park, hunting for flowers and other treasures. My mom and I soon spotted a Caspian Tern, with its signature big red bill, foraging for fish in the shallows of Lake Michigan. At the same time, the horizon was strangely hazy, and we smelled something odd — a tarry, smoky scent. This was our first whiff of the massive smoke-banks that would roll into the Upper Midwest, breaking records for worst air quality in multiple cities. We’d spend the next couple days indoors.

All these things — the kids frolicking, the smoke moving in, the Caspian Tern over the water — happened at once. How to make sense of it all together? It struck me as a microcosm of our times: so much good and so much bad that it’s hard to take stock and say what it all means. It was clear we were getting an in-person taste of what it means for Canada’s boreal forests to be drier, hotter, and burn more easily due to climate change. Those conditions have consequences for people hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

We made the most of our trip, having the kids run around indoors, playing music, and going to museums. In a couple of days, the smoke cleared as rapidly as it had arrived, leaving behind clear skies and superb air quality. The shift in the atmosphere was bizarre to witness from a beach south of Milwaukee: people swimming in the light surf and kids building sandcastles seemed unimaginable a couple days before.

There are days when the intense contrasts and contradictions of our times stand out more than others. We hope that they don’t happen on vacation, but you never know. In reflecting on the trip, I’ve been thinking about how for life to feel full and complete, I need to feel like I am both 1) part of the solution and working to make things better 2) connected to people, places, and things that support me. I need a balance between the two. For many people, birds are one of the connections that provides daily support, in small ways and big ones. I keep thinking about that effortlessly graceful Caspian Tern searching the shallows for fish, cruising above the shore with distant smoke on the horizon. Birds help us make it through the hard times. Let’s do our best to help them, too.