I have endured days of excessive heat, and I have lived through winters when temperatures never seemed to get out of the single digits. I have also enjoyed (“enjoyed” is the right word) blizzards that put down two feet of snow in a 24-hour period. Never, under any of those conditions, did I feel trapped in my house. I feel trapped now, and the reason, as everyone in the eastern third of the United States knows, is poor air quality caused by the fires in Canada and the Pacific Northwest.

I don’t really understand the air quality index (AQI), but I know that anything under 50 is considered safe. La Crosse’s number usually is less than 20, but this July, depending on the specific day, it has been anywhere from 50 to 160. La Crosse has actually been lucky in terms of air quality. On July 16, the number in Milwaukee exceeded 600, and this is on an AQI scale that only goes up to 500. When I tried to find out how a number could exceed the maximum, I discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency only measures up to 500 and then reports anything higher as “beyond index.” (I could be wrong, but the White House might be using a similar method to report Trump’s weight.)

I had a plan for the month of August, and that plan was to avoid anything that felt like an obligation. After returning from our trip to Maine, I was going to limit my activities to writing on my front porch, playing guitar, riding my bike, paddling, fishing, gardening, and taking evening walks with Manyu. Currently none of those pursuits, with the exception of the guitar, are advisable.

I shouldn’t be complaining about smoky air when there are people who are dealing directly with the fires. The news, at least the news coming from the mainstream national press, focuses on the smoke and tells me very little about the fires themselves. I have a personal interest in the wildfires either side of the Minnesota/Ontario border, and even they are being covered only by regional Twin Cities newspapers and tv stations.

So I, along with the rest of the Midwest, have hunkered down. My house has central air, and I will run it for as long as I need to. Even on bad days, nothing is so bad that I can’t step outside for short periods. I just shouldn’t assert myself physically. Exercising indoors during the summer is a poor substitute for long bike rides along the river, but I’ll be heading to the Y as soon as I finish a draft of this blog entry. I am going to relax this August – just not quite in the way that I had in mind.

(Two days after writing this blog, air quality in La Crosse temporarily improved, and I was able to ride my bicycle for a few days. The opportunity to exercise outdoors has alleviated my sense of confinement, but I don’t want to change anything I’ve written here. “Trapped” captured my sentiments when I wrote it, and I’ll probably feel that way again when the higher numbers return.)

I am currently on a delayed flight from Bangor, Maine to Chicago. Manyu and I will miss our connecting flight to La Crosse, so I don’t know when we’ll get home. All that I can do is make the best of it and rough out this week’s blog.

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I am trying to remember back, but I may have just taken only the second touristy National Park vacation in my life.* In years past when I visited places like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, even Death Valley, I went backpacking. I may be wrong in my definition of a tourist, but in my opinion, I stop being one once I spend my first night in the backcountry. Last week, however, my extended family (my mom, Manyu, my two sisters, my brother, my brother’s wife, and I) rented an airbnb in Bar Harbor, Maine, and we were definitely tourists. Together we visited the main attractions of Acadia National Park. This included a ride along the Park Loop Road, seafood dinners at various lobster shacks, a drive up Cadillac Mountain, a boat ride to see puffins, and a carriage ride along the Rockefeller family’s original carriage roads.

None of these activities are how I normally experience a natural area, but this vacation was for my ninety-year mom, and I was happy to do it. Now that the trip is over (or will be over whenever Manyu and I get home), I think of it more as an education than a holiday. Here are a few of the lessons that I learned:

1. Tourists are friendly. My only past experience with large crowds of tourists has been Disneyworld, and there I’ve always encountered people at the ends of their ropes. At Acadia, every person I encountered was relaxed and glad to be there. My opinion of humankind actually went up a notch while I was on the trip.

2. Tourism and spontaneity are not compatible. Several members of my family would not relax until I’d put together a complete five-day itinerary. I didn’t want to do it, but those who most worried about having a complete schedule were right about having one. Half of our activities (e.g., the boat tour, the carriage ride, the bicycle rentals) required reservations. Even with plans, we weren’t able to get the most treasured permit in the park, which is the predawn pass to Cadillac Mountain. We did get to go up Cadillac Mountain, but it was for sunset, not sunrise.

3. People do get away from their cars. The cliché about national parks is that visitors never get more than a hundred yards away from their vehicles. If true, then Acadia is an anomaly. The rocky shorelines and tide pools, even those some distance from any parking lot, were crowded. Entire families, many with young kids, tackled several of the challenging mountain trails. When I biked a twenty-eight mile loop along carriage roads, I was rarely out of sight of other bikers. Most were on ebikes, but they were out there well away from their cars.

4. I no longer consider myself immortal. My family hiked the Gorham Mountain Trail, and the last section of that particular loop also serves as the trailhead to a peak called the Beehive. The Beehive is one of the most difficult hikes in the park and includes vertical walls with steel rungs drilled directly into the granite. There was no confusing the Gorham Mountain hikers with the those on their way to the Beehive. The Beehivers were in their teens and twenties, and they bounded past me on the trail as if I was standing still. A few of the teenagers brought along their parents, but even the moms and dads of these young adventurers were twenty-five years my junior. Had I not been with my family, I would have done the Beehive just to prove to myself that I could still do it, but the key point to be made here is that I didn’t regret that I did not try. Five years ago not doing the Beehive would have gnawed at me for the entire trip. Something inside of me has changed. (Now that I am writing about it, I have to admit that it bothers me a little bit.)

Several years ago, my mom and my siblings had to cancel a trip to Yellowstone because of Western fires, My mom has been hoping for an alternate trip ever since. It feels good to have finally done it.

• The first tourist trip was in the Badlands and the Black Hills.