Monday, May 8, 2017

Same Horrible Washcloth




Up at 4:30 AM.  I was in the bathroom and I went back to bed.  Before hugging the pillow I checked the time.  “When its’ 4:30AM I need to get up” I thought.  There will be a car downstairs waiting for me at 5:00AM.  It was already 4:32 or so.  I lay down for a moment and allowed myself the minute or two of submission.  Soon I was fiddling with the knobs, squinting with contact-less eyes, over and into the steamy shower.

In the car then, I arrange get on line.  I try to chat with the driver: "Please use Gaobailu.  But outside even at 5:10AM it is obvious that it is heinously polluted.  There is no morning sun on the rise.  There is no appetite to appreciate the mild temperature and the leaves on the spring time trees, rather there is a dull sense of sympathy for everyone who is outside in this weather and a numbing acknowledgement that whatever it is they are breathing is in no way different from what you are breathing.



Now the worst part.  This is the saddest, most hopeless part of the story.  This is the part where despair blankets, the moment when you consider the all-consuming burden of the Chinese leadership and the dead weight of the Chinese people.  I’m on a green, reasonably environmentally friendly, high speed train, which is whisking hundreds of passengers across the northern Zhili plain towards the port city of Qingdao.  We travel at speeds American terrestrial commuters can only dream of.  And outside the weather, this awful pall of smog and dust, is as constant as the train tracks.

I’ve done this journey before when the smog is upon us, this migration from Beijing across and down into the ancient kingdom of Qi.  The pollution holds.  The metaphor of a polluted city like London: the big black smoke, or the freeways of L.A. that rest beneath mountains, trapping the smog . . . this is pollution as a swath of the continent.  The foul air seeded with the Gobi dust that gives the Yellow River its name, this sieve of weighted air collects particulate refuse and bears it along, enhanced by but oblivious to one or another mere civic boundary.  I suspect the entire northern plain of China from Henan to Shandong is blanked in the same horrible washcloth this morning.



It is no longer about getting out of the city to enjoy some fresh country air.  I’m already well into the country.  This is rural Hebei outside, sparsely populated by Chinese standards, and the air looks no different from downtown Beijing.  Perhaps the coasts are clear.  Perhaps it does break after a mountain pass in Shanxi or exhaust itself southward as one sales down the spine of Jiangsu.   But I suspect many hundreds of millions of people, certainly a USA’s worth of humanity is confronting this wretched view this morning.  It almost necessarily is moving out towards South Korea and across the sea to Japan this morning as well.  And so while more subways and less cars, and less coal plants and conscientious recycling will all help towards incremental progress, this is not an urban problem.  This is a continental issue.


And later, the wind blew all the dust and the smog away.  And it was such a lovely sunny afternoon, almost beyond belief, that I took a bike ride with my younger daughter. 



Friday, 5/05/17

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