So when we woke up on Saturday in Portland, Maine and smelled smoke from the forest fire at the Wemotaci First Nation reserve in Central Quebec, that was something.

By my calculations the town of La Tuque is about 350 miles as the crow flies.

That’d be like if Portlanders smelled smoke from the collapse of World Trade Center in New York on September 11th.

This fire is actually 52 fires, ranging in size from two to 100,000 acres.

So back to to May 19, 1780 – New England’s Dark Day – think about the fires that must have been raging to cover Jersey to Portland in complete darkness.

For more on the current fires, here’s an article from the Ottawa Citizen: “Quebec forest fires cast pall over Ottawa“.