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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