Merely Obscured

My daughter was going to go on a field trip today.  She was terribly excited, as we had visited the place before on a family outing.  An hour or more’s drive north from Beijing is a series of Tang Dynasty caves that are hollowed out and abandoned but once housed a whole colony of refugees and exiles.  She was looking forward to being quite likely the only person who’d seen the place before.  Late March and the trees would just be blooming. 

This morning early she burst in my room and went straight to my computer.  What’s up honey?  Checking the AQI.  It’s early.  I’m not quite sure what she’s saying.  I look up and there’s a map of greater Beijing and with various numeric bubbles on my laptop and it all starts flooding back.  She had told me last evening when we did the emergency-run trip to the supermarket to get lunch material for the excursion that the trip would be canceled if the air quality index were too high. 

At first it appeared that the index was low and she’d be all right.  But as she fiddled about it became clear that the rating for much of the city were all quite high.  The trip would likely be canceled. 

I’m driving around the city now.  The pall of particulate dust stretches out across all of the sky.  The dust has a gravitational quality so that any straight gaze is slowly, imperceptibly pulled downward.  It is a particularly ironic haze today as it would otherwise be a lovely early spring day.  The sun isn’t hidden behind clouds.  It’s right there.  This should be a sunny day.  It’s merely obscured by dust.  There are a few cherry blossom trees in full bloom out and around.  There are magnolia trees blooming and buds of all different variety preparing to rise and unfold.  They are also obscured by dust.  Buildings, cars, roads, needless to say, are all blanketed in dust.   And the truly sad part as we learned this morning on the map, is that it extends out for hours in every direction.