west by northwest (by midwest)

Finally, a wheatpaste campaign I can get behind: Free rides on TRAX (SLC light rail) during dreaded “red air days.”

But the more I think about it, the more this campaign feels typical of the car-oriented culture here in Utah: public transportation as a last resort. If more residents rode TRAX (or biked, walked, took buses) in the first place, then SLC could reduce pollution before the air reaches red-alert levels. Why wait until a public health emergency to finally make public transport affordable, attractive and feasible?

That is not necessarily a critique—more an observation of how deeply ingrained car culture really is here. After all, knowing how far to push an issue is half the battle, and there is very little political will in Utah to sacrifice pickup trucks and SUVs for the public good.

I have not left my apartment in days. Venturing outside means diving into the thick, toxic soup of the inversion.

In the few minutes it took to snap these photos from a balcony in my building, the familiar metallic taste crept across my tongue like I was sucking on a dirty penny or licking blood from a wound. My sinus headache came back. My lungs still ache.

I ordered a stronger air filter Saturday delivery, so as of yesterday afternoon, I could breathe inside my apartment, but what happens when I leave for groceries? How long will I have to pace around indoors, hiding from the blue smog?  How long until a storm finally frightens it away?

And when the “clouds” finally leave, where, exactly, do they go?

Contrast the blue cityscape with the vivd brights close up.

By the afternoon, the same buildings looked like this:

The mountains act like the rim of a bowl, letting the toxic stew simmer in the valley:

At night, the inversion pulls a blue curtain across the mountains:

Last week, I ran down the apartment complex stairs and immediately stopped in my tracks when I opened the ground-floor exit: the air felt so thin, and the mountain ridges appeared so crisp, almost as if they were cardboard stage props.  I felt as though I were standing inside a snow globe, with perfect, clean air pumped in from an oxygen tank. Nothing looked real.  Brick corners appeared extra sharp. Grass blades glowed so green they made me squint.

It was, of course, a good air day: meaning, low levels of particulates.  The inversion of previous days had lifted, and I could breathe again without the taste of exhaust fumes on my teeth and tongue. I stood and breathed deep for a few minutes, my lungs aching after so many days of pollution.  The air felt healing.  I imagined oxygen washing away little filaments in my lungs.

But the strange feeling in the air was more than just a low level of particulates. The neon signs of a shop across the street burst in technicolor brights, as if bleeding out of the tubes.  My head ached.  My left eye stabbed with pain: what I call an icepick-in-the-eye.

It felt like tornado weather.  Like a sudden drop in pressure before the inevitable destruction.  I know this from summers in Iowa – from all the times I ran outside as a kid to gape at funnel clouds.

But there was no tornado.  According to the news that evening, we had the lowest barometric pressure on record in the state of Utah.  A storm system had generated record low pressures throughout the west.

For this west by northwest (by midwest) girl, it felt as though I had been transported back to Iowa for a brief moment.  “We’re not in Utah anymore,” I said to myself as I cut across a parking lot, smiling and breathing deep.

When I tell distant friends or acquaintances about the air problem in Salt Lake City, they inevitably remark that it cannot be that bad.  No way can I chew the air or taste the pollution on my teeth.  No way does it leave rain-puddle rainbows on my gums.  No way do I need to wear a mask on the red days.  These images must be hyperbole.

“If it were that bad,” several of them have said, “we would hear about it on the news.”

And this, I find fascinating.  Have we become so accustomed to mediated culture and 24-hour-news cycles that we no longer believe raw, unfiltered, eyewitness accounts – or what we used to call back in my journalism days primary sources? Does Anderson Cooper need to scoop a sample of Salt Lake City’s red-day air with a spoon and slurp a few sips – live, on camera – before the toxic soup transcends hyperbole and becomes real?

Some of these friends are nonfiction writers laboring for years on memoirs and personal essays. This, I find even more fascinating. One would think such writers would believe deeply – fanatically, even – in firsthand accounts. In being eyewitnesses to events. But memoirs, primary sources though they may be, are of course intensely mediated; the very act of crafting them into a coherent narrative – or in many cases, a marketable story – makes them into something different.  Truth, yes.  True, maybe not.  Or is that the other way around?

And one can say the same of this blog: I craft my posts carefully.  Does that make them any less true?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But it does make them mediated, and therefore, believable somehow.  For as soon as I stopped telling friends about the air and simply writing about it, the story finally found that rainbow connection.  And some choose to believe it.

In Portland, Mt. Hood disappeared for days at a time inside the winter mist and fog.  I used to check every morning for its snow cap in the distance, secretly fearing it might have gone missing in the night – that the clouds would roll away to reveal blue sky and a flat horizon. Sometimes, I wanted the mountain to disappear – poof, like the Statue of Liberty on the David Copperfield special I witnessed wide-eyed (though never quite falling for the trick) as a kid – so I could stare off into the vanishing point.

Yesterday morning, I peeked through my blinds to check on the toxic soup that is Salt Lake City’s winter air.  To my surprise, I could see the rough edges of the mountains – clear as a map’s political boundaries. This meant the air was relatively clean.  The inversion had lifted.

Sure enough, the air quality website confirmed it: a green air day.  Moderate. No action required. It was safe to take a walk without a mask.  Safe to switch off the air filter, the hum of which serves as a constant reminder of the decaying-tooth-cap taste in the air outside.

Then I realized: The smog in Salt Lake City has driven me to the same morning ritual as the mist and fog of Portland.  Somehow, when the fog and mist were natural, this ritual felt more like a game – a match – between Mt. Hood and me.  It felt personal.  Here in Salt Lake City, I feel nothing for – or from – the mountains at all, even though their very presence makes the inversions possible.  They might be complicit in trapping the toxic fumes, but they seem to hold no grudge with me.

On the contrary, the disappearing mountains in SLC feel much closer in character to that Copperfield trick: mere mortals making mountains disappear, just by pumping out pollutants. Smog as a sleight of hand.  But I am skeptical of the trick every time.  The air clears, and voila! The mountains reappear.  We like to believe we brought them back, but they lurked in the smog all along.

Maybe, just maybe, I am starting to believe in this geography.  Maybe I am not really checking for the mountains anymore.