It's 900 Out There

I’m not sure if these alerts we get on our phones are good or bad.  Certainly, they’re somber.  The air bubble note I got said: “The pollution today is “off the charts.”  Thanks.  500 is a terrible day.  Yesterday was 900.  That’s like Jimi Hendrix’ “methane sea.”   I don’t know if I would have necessarily noticed the severity so decidedly.   It was a vaguely yellow morning.   Neither of the girls wanted to wake up to join me for the gym.  But it’s a dense dim morning otherwise unworthy of special mention.

Driving to the gym it became clear that Beijing’s fabled springtime dust storms had swept into the city.  The dust from the Gobi Desert had settled into the city in a manner that probably isn’t different from when the spring storms blew into Kangxi’s capital two hundred and fifty years ago.  But what was different was that in this industrial era, the coal and the dust and the exhaust of modern life now had a meshing to cling to.  Now our Gobi sand was worsened into a sandy polluted cocktail.

The gym at the kid’s school is air-locked.  I could go inside and pretend that breathing was an upbeat thing to do.  At least it was possible to exercise freely.  There, alone for the morning I was able to continue on at the machines a bit longer and use a few contraptions I hadn’t used for some time.   It is good to feel one’s muscles.

Later, every conversation with someone in Beijing was punctuated with jokes and barbs and incredulous assertions that it was polluted outside.  Clearly this 900 number had become the civic meme, now on was on everyone’s lips.  My kids quoted it when then came home from school.  I like to crack the window as my office gets stuffy.  My wife came and checked it once and then twice to make sure I hadn’t allowed for any outside air, which is necessarily the same that is inside, to enter our home. “It’s 900 out there.”

With a simple backyard view that only extended a few meters I could get to work.  I forget about the air, if my view didn’t extend beyond a meter, or two.  May nature bring gusts of fresh air tomorrow to push all this away.

Thursday, 05/04/17