Oregon is on fire. Throughout the state, tens of thousands of people have been forced to take refuge. They are sleeping in their cars, in a convention center, on the floors of packed prisons. Several towns have been destroyed. Cities have been evacuated. Hundreds of homes have burned. The suburbs of Portland are threatened, and the situation might get worse: Unusually strong, dry winds and very high temperatures make the wildfires hard to fight.

Washington State is home to more than 7.6 million residents, most living on the western side of the Cascade Mountains. I originally published these photos of Washington last year, dedicating them to my mother and father, who loved their home state, and who had passed away the month before. The warm reactions to that photo story were what inspired me to undertake this larger project, “Fifty,” presenting wide-ranging collections of images of each state in the U.S.

Tim LahanThe correct answer to the question “How are you?” is Not too bad.Why? Because it’s all-purpose. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions, Not too bad will get you through. In good times it projects a decent pessimism, an Eeyore-ish reluctance to get carried away. On an average day it bespeaks a muddling-through modesty. And when things are rough, really rough, it becomes a heroic understatement.

This is the era of expecting the worst while hoping for the merely tolerable. Some might say that the worst is already happening—economic disaster and 190,000 dead from a pandemic—while the president and his surrogates insist, in a feat of self-delusion, that the “best is yet to come.

In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in exhaustive detail how Russia sowed division in the United States and sought to meddle in the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.