‘Apocalypse on their mind’: Bay Area transfixed by foreboding, orange, smoke-choked skies

The sun, which is usually reliable, slept in on Wednesday.

That’s the way it seemed throughout the Bay Area as the smoke from countless wildfires mixed with clouds and fog to tint the sky, and just about everything else, a dark burnt orange. Some folks said it felt like living on the next planet over, the red one.

Others said it was like a solar eclipse, but longer, or the apocalypse, but less biblical. Some called the darkness a metaphor for life in the days of global warming, of the pandemic, of social unrest, of endless electioneering.

Strange and foreboding it was. And how long it would last was, like the sky, unclear. For the first time ever, tomorrow’s sunrise no longer seemed a sure thing.

Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, said the unusual atmosphere could linger.

“Not a lot of change is expected,” Borrmann said.

The sun did come up on Wednesday, meteorologists confirmed, but it kept largely to itself, on the other side of the thick blanket of smoke, fog, haze and muck. Meanwhile, headlights and porch lights stayed on all day. Flashlights came out at high noon.

“Pretty much all the customers have the apocalypse on their mind. It’s a metaphor for our current plight,” said barista Leah Lozano, who was taking out the trash in the morning darkness at a coffee shop on San Francisco’s West Portal Avenue.

The ominous shroud, experts said, was a product of the plumes of smoke billowing from the historic number of wildfires burning across the state, as well as Oregon and Washington. Wind conditions overnight pushed smoke into lower elevations, filtering sunlight and producing dark tints of red, orange and gray. Still, air quality remained mostly unchanged.

The orange dimness confused almost everyone and everything — from the Bay Lights display on the Bay Bridge, which is supposed to turn off a half hour after sunrise, to pets acting unusually standoffish to folks who spied the early-morning darkness, figured their alarm clocks were wrong, and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Hours after sunrise, dawn remained something of an oversight. At high noon, the heavens grew darker instead of lighter. The surreal replaced what passes for the real.

At the San Francisco Zoo, the birds and the koalas were provided with artificial light. Unlighted pathways were closed to visitors.

“Some of our animals were confused because the sun didn’t come out,” said San Francisco Zoo spokeswoman Nancy Chan.

It seemed to be all anyone could talk about.

“It feels like the end of the world, or like Mordor. But I guess it’s just a weird mix of smog and smoke and haze,” said Catherine Geeslin, snapping cell phone pictures of the dark sky from West Portal. “It was alarming to see it’s still dark. And it will be strange to have lunch in the dark. But you still have to get on with your day.”

Sitting in front of a San Francisco coffee shop, Bob Kovash of San Francisco was sipping his drink, eating a bagel and marveling about the daylight darkness.

“It’s like another world,” he said. “I had to check my clocks to make sure they were working. When you expect it to be light and it’s dark, well, that’s a big deal.”

Despite the haze, there was little scent of smoke over most of the Bay Area, and the air quality in most areas was either good or moderate, according to Bay Area Air Quality Management District sensors.

Borrmann said most of the Bay Area wasn’t smelling much smoke thanks to the marine layer that crept in Tuesday night and persisted. Smoke from Northern California fires, particularly the Bear Fire in Butte County and the August Fire in the northern part of the state, was pouring into the Bay Area but being held aloft by “a substantial marine layer,” Borrmann said.

“We have smoke above and fog below,” he said.

What little sunlight that poked through was being diffused by the smoke, scattering blue wavelengths of light and leaving reds and yellows, creating the glowing, gray-orange skies and unsettling darkness.

Many folks going about what passes for normal these days admitted to being unnerved.

At Lakeshore Nails on San Francisco’s Sloat Boulevard, manager Fiona Huyng had strung special lights above four manicure stations on the sidewalk so the staff could give $50 mani-pedis no matter what. San Francisco still bans indoor hair and nail treatments due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Each one is taking an extra 10 to 20 minutes. You have to be extra careful, ” said Huyng, who had never done a mani-pedi in the dark before. “It’s more difficult in the dark. If you make a mistake when you cut, there could be bleeding.”

Muni driver Marlon McPherson, behind the wheel of an outbound 48 bus on Vicente Street, said he turned the lights on at 9:30 a.m. for the first time in his career.

“Some people are driving really slow in the dark and some people are driving like maniacs,” he said. “It’s really weird. But you have to be ready for anything.”

Miroslav Kokaric of San Francisco pedaled to Ocean Beach on his e-bike and spent a long time gazing to the west, where the sun usually hangs out at day’s end.

“It’s like a sci-fi movie,” he said. “Like somebody put a dome over the whole world.”

While the spooky conditions rattled some, others, like Brian Duffy, also drinking coffee in the dark on West Portal, were unfazed.

“What are you going to do?” he said. “This is Mother Nature at its best. I never sat in the dark at 9 a.m. before. It’s just a mix of fog and smoke, that’s all.”

Michael Cabanatuan and Steve Rubenstein are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com, srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan @SteveRubeSF