My History with Bad Air

Take a Deep Breath - my history with bad air

By Charles E. Kraus

Seattle --      

Excuse me while I step inside for a breath of fresh air.  That joke has been making the rounds.  So has the smoke.  From time to time throughout the day I become obsessed with checking the air quality.  Ironically, my computer screen defaults to accuweather.com and all I have to do to find out the current status of unbreathability is "refresh" the page.   Something ironic about that.

I live just north of Seattle in a place called Lake Forest Park.  The signs welcome you to “Tree City USA.”  I hope forest fires can’t read.   I’m old enough to have experienced four bouts of pneumonia plus an assortment of other respiratory ailments.   This is not the first time I’ve found it uncomfortable to inhale.  But it's been a while since I could trace such problems to proximate conditions in the wide wide world.  

The bad air of my distant past had "due in part to human irresponsibility" stamped on pockets of atmosphere so thick and polluted you could carve your initials in them.

A month or two after moving to 1970s Los Angeles, I looked out my kitchen window and was startled to see mountains.  They'd simply materialized.  Beautiful, majestic mountains.  It was as if Disney had assembled them in the middle of the night.  But, no.  The explanation turned out to be that the smog had lifted revealing natural beautiful generally hidden by the unintended consequences of a highly mobile industrialized society.   

My eyes are burning today.  Sadly, I’m out of Systane.  I’d go get a refill, but am not supposed to leave the house.  The dirty air would choke me.  And besides, I'm old, and adhere to pandemic restrictions that keep me from entering stores.  

My eyes know all about the pitfalls of corrosive air.  LA was not my only California address.  I am also a surviver of Pasadena air so foul that there was a constant sting awaiting your every breath. Your eyes burned and your skin itched.  Know that mountain I had trouble seeing from my Los Angeles kitchen window?  Now I was living on it, and I still couldn't see it.

Worse than any of this was the year I spent, part of my Vietnam Era Naval career, when I was assigned a desk three decks down in a converted storage space on the USS Fulton.  The room had no ventilation system.  By the end of each day, the eight sailors who worked there, seven smoking cigarettes plus me, could not look across the florescent lighting and actually locate the bulkhead.  Pulling my undershirt off in the evening as I prepared to shower, the fabric stank so badly that I developed a habit of holding my breath as I lifted it over my head.  

The Fulton was an ancient submarine tender that only left port twice during the year I spent onboard.  Twice and for very short durations.  Out to sea to dump nuclear waste.

Respect for the environment?  Not then.  Not yet.  Air today, air tomorrow.  I hope it's better by then.