“I thought this was good idea and about the only time a mask is effective.”
If you can still breath through the mask, it’s not stopping the smoke from getting through. Particulates large enough for a mask to stop would have dropped out of the sky long before that smoke traveled all the way to the USA.
I wore a navy blue polo yesterday outside for several hours. Wife said, "What is all that on your shirt?" I took a couple of the biggest pieces with a tweezer and put them under my old B&L double-magnifier on my stamp collecting board. The largest piece of ash was 1mm x 2mm irregular square.
That's not to say you're not right, since wildfire particulate matter can actually enter the bloodstream (!), R95 is not going to eliminate all of it.