Monday, November 30, 2015

Dirty Green Truck




God damn, it smells nasty out there.  There ain’t no polite way to render that.  The air is foul.  It smells the way it does when you drive through Shandong province and come upon a village that has a prominent chemical plant.  There’s a dust swirling around out there in the nighttime air.  Some of it is exhaust; some of it is a trick of the light.  Some of it is industrial effulgence.

Off in to the city this evening.  Meeting a friend, who’d lived here for sixteen years and then moved his family down to Hong Kong, on account of all the foul air.  It must be that nasty air that usually moves along, out to sea, has become trapped in it’s majority and has nowhere to go but swirl around and around here, along this gulley, by those trees.  The air quality is wretched as a default in Beijing, but the pungent odor I’m confronting helps to anchor everything another layer deeper into this evening’s Inferno.  Breathe less.



Look at this monstrous dump truck to my right.  It’s late and it’s the only time he’s allowed to drive on these streets.  Who is the driver of this truck?  Will I get to see him at this red light?  No.  I’m stuck behind his backside.  Beneath a millennium’s worth of strata, I see the cheerful green paint that this truck sailed out of the factory with.  It is clear: driving that dirty, green truck must be very, very grinding, indeed.





The light changed.  We passed him.  But his window was also covered in dirt and in the dark I could see nothing of who this driver was.  I’m going to imagine that his tendons are exposed and he's focused, on the road ahead. 


I’m sure that all twenty million people here in Beijing are sharing the same fantasy this evening:  fresh air.  Winter isn’t an easy season anywhere in the world, where it's far enough north to snow and snow.  But foulness of the air makes the cold and the wet and the sick and the dark much, much worse.   Traffic though.  That is not seasonal.  Traffic is a perennial.  We need all plants, perennials and otherwise, to breathe more.  Much more.

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