Pathetic, Futuristic, Space Colony

I was up extra early this morning.  If I was going to do my gym run, I needed to leave thirty minutes earlier.  My little one had a field trip today into the city, near Gu Lou and she needed to be up at seven and over to school no later than seven-fifteen.  All do-able.  All work-able.  Just start everything a bit early.  And so just before six, with only a bit of light outside, I got my keys and phone and headed to the door.  Leaving I noticed a solitary message on my screen: “the air pollution level is hazardous.” 

In the early morning hours, it isn’t easy to discern just how bad things are.  But quickly as one starts off down the road, with swirls of murk spinning before your headlights immediately clear that ever more daylight will simply reveal a terrible, polluted morning. 

As in some pathetic, futuristic space colony, our school has an air locked environment.  The gym has purified air, so I can forget about all this for a while, as I exercise.  Heading home forty minutes later this Wednesday has revealed itself to be a thoroughly wretched, day of intense pollution.   My home, where I'll be for most of the day, is not air locked. 

It has to be said, that even during the days of the Emperor Kangxi, Beijing, with its “perfect” feng shui, mountains on three sides, on the edge of a desert, is also a perfect trap for the dust storms of the Gobi desert.  No one was burning coal or revving their engines when the YongLe Emperor broadcast China’s ascendency to the world, from his Gu Gong throne, but these storms happened in the fifteenth century just like today.  Dust blew in and settled here making life unpleasant. It goes with the territory here in the northern capital.  But where as those storms picked up lots of all natural if nasty detritus along the way, one can only imagine that this thick strainer is dragging along a cocktail of chemicals and pollutants from yet-to-be-controlled, polluting provinces over the hills, outside the capital. 

I took my little one to school.  I gave her a mask to use, while she was on the trip.  By the time I got home my wife informed me that the trip had been cancelled.  They all have to go some  other day.

Wednesday, 3/28/18