I’ve Got You Under My Skin

 August 6, 2005, is a good day. The summer monsoon has pushed thunderstorms into the high desert, and as the damp air flows north and east, there’s a risk of flash floods in the foothills above the city. The inversion layer is down to 600 feet, clamping a lid overhead as featureless and solid-seeming as concrete. Visibility is four or five battleship-gray miles into utter nothingness. The city is marooned in its air. Still, it’s a good day.

The Air Quality Management District’s online monitor says particulate pollution is only moderate; ozone levels are low, too. The AQMD’s air-quality index is only just beginning to peak into the range of “unhealthful for sensitive groups” in the valleys. Some people may begin to feel a characteristic catch in the back of their throat as they breathe the heavy air.

Exactly 50 years before, when I was nearly 7 and spent nearly every summer day outside in my baby-boom neighborhood with other boys my age or a little older, the breaths we drew with such urgency contained some of the highest levels of air pollution ever measured in the basin. The bright sun over our heads cooked together gritty particulates from diesel motors and locomotives, nitrogen oxide from manufacturing plants, carbon monoxide from car exhaust, sulfur dioxide from oil-fired industrial furnaces, and stray hydrocarbons evaporating from solvents and degreasers, household paints and gasoline. Epidemiological studies in 1959 would show an extra 1,200 fatalities over a 10-day period in mid-August 1955, mostly among the elderly and chronically sick. Ground-level ozone concentrations rose in the still air on each of those summer days, topping at 0.68 parts per million (or more than six times the federal health standard).

Boys hurrying down the block to catch the Helms Bakery truck couldn’t see the ozone. It’s not one of the colors in the vivid palette of smog. It’s a transparent, highly reactive gas refined in sunlight from volatile hydrocarbons and the byproducts of auto exhaust. For many adults, at 0.02 parts per million (the current AQMD “stage 1” alert level), ozone can start to sting the eyes and tinge each breath with pain. At higher concentrations, people wheeze and develop a headache. Some cough. Some feel lightheaded.

Running in air this polluted for just 30 minutes, according to the American Lung Association, is like smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Little kids, oddly enough, were said not to experience these adverse reactions, or they didn’t report them to the district’s researchers in the 1950s, because that’s what kids born into smog imagined the summer air was supposed to feel like and smell like, like a combination of spot remover and a gas station (and not an entirely unpleasant smell).

I didn’t pay attention to what I couldn’t see in the deepening gray-brown air. Maybe my throat was scratchy that day, but my mom was a heavy smoker then, and the effects of that were far worse. I remember my eyes watering when I got older, but I don’t remember if they did that August. I’ve almost forgotten what breathing the unmitigated pollution of 50 years ago felt like, but my body hasn’t. I still bear the marks of that afternoon in my lungs and heart and arteries — and all the afternoons spent in the smog years, even after responsible adults knew what caused the air to turn the color of a fresh bruise, knew much of what air pollution could do to boys like me, and knew how to prevent at least some of it from happening.

The first breath I took was of this troubled air in 1948. Its quality had been declining steadily since 1919, when the region’s non-agricultural economy began to boom and a million newly infatuated migrants started arriving in Los Angeles to begin enjoying “health and happiness” in what they had been told was a land of perpetual sunshine. That was the usual bait and switch.

Oil refining, tire manufacturing, aircraft assembly, auto making and shipbuilding were beginning to give sleepy L.A. a businesslike air, create jobs and make the place something more than a home for retired Hoosiers and “lungers” hoping for a tuberculosis cure. By 1935, Los Angeles (with the Firestone, Goodyear and Goodrich plants) was second to Akron, Ohio, in tire production and (with GM, Chrysler, Ford and Studebaker) second to Detroit in auto production.

Industrialization improved L.A. — so much improvement that the decline was obvious in the city’s extraordinary qualities of light and air, which everyone in the previous 30 years had remarked on, which had helped bring filmmakers from New York and New Jersey. The disenchanted were quick to compare the sales pitch with reality. By 1948, dystopian L.A. — the shrouded city of “treacherous unbrightness,” the city that always cheated on its lovers — was painted in the colors of smog: sunsets that ran from peach to dried blood, daylight that shaded from urine to adobe. The smoggy city’s depiction in movies and novels became as structured as a villanelle: the city always seen from a height, from a freeway overpass, from a seat in a descending jetliner, the air in layers of yellow and tan, the hapless observer always going under, down to a carcinogenic sea.