In the summer of 1978, I visited the state where I was born, the state where I would later live for more than 20 years, for the first time since I was a year old.
One of the great regrets of my life was that I never had the chance to experience Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, the years of my childhood.
My first wife lived out her childhood in California, although her home base was the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our brief sojourn in Los Angeles included a trip to the beach, a day at Disneyland and my first ever visit to Dodger Stadium. But one thing it was impossible to ignore was the truly horrible air quality. On July 5th, the morning we left to return to my in-laws’ home in Northern Nevada, we left via San Bernardino to drive up Highway 395 past the Mojave Desert.
We stopped for gas at around 7 a.m. outside of San Bernardino, and I saw a truly shocking sight I had never seen before, anywhere in the world. The sky was a bizarre shade of purple, and I thought this must be what the sky would look like on Jupiter or Saturn.
By the time I visited again in 1986 and moved to Los Angeles to live in 1990, the air was much cleaner. Although there were still bad air days, I never saw anything like 1978 again.
Until I saw the pictures from New York this week.
It’s the result of the Canadian fires, and as of Tuesday evening, New York had the worst air quality of ever major city in the world. Even worse than Delhi, so infamous for its terrible air pollution that people living their lives there have nine years shorter life expectancy than other humans.
In fact, the air is so bad in New York that even staying indoors isn’t complete protection.
You know what does help? As much as the MAGA crowd will hate to hear it, the same masks that helped protect people from COVID-19 will provide some protection from the current problems with air pollution.
And while the end of the fires — when it comes — will help in the short run, it ought to be fairly obvious that the overall picture is not getting better.
Climate deniers will have their say and call this just another fluke, but whether it can be proven or not, things are not getting better. It’s actually so bad in the northeast today that major league baseball games in New York and Philadelphia were postponed because of unhealthy air.
It’s difficult to imagine games being played in the northeast in the next few days.
After all, Canada is still burning.