Looking Up

Last week, one of my dearest friends moved to China. With a young son in tow and hopscotching flights, it would be an exhausting journey and a week or so before I’d hear news of her arrival. When I do, she sends a lengthy missive in list form of the happenings and findings in her first few days into a transplanted life (there is no tub, she is heading to the flea market to look for a very large pot to bathe in, the job she was promised is about 10 hours a week more than originally discussed…). But the very first point she writes is the following:

Luoyang is amazing despite the fact that flowerbeds and parks are dug up for new growth, I can’t understand a damn thing anyone’s saying and have a secret fear I never will, the layer of smog hangs in the sky and there is no sun, no stars, no other place to look to.

My friend lived in the Pacific Northwest for years, and grew up in Alaska. She’s seen a lot of sky, felt a lot of grass on the scale of Walt Whitman beneath her feet. And she notices when sky and soil are missing. Now in the world’s most populous country, geography is enveloped by the tangible needs of daily human life–buildings to sleep and work in, pollution-generating cars to transport to and from the coordinates of work and home and errands, product generation for consumption.

We are aware of the precarious state of the planet’s health. Entire polital campaigns are slanted to this angle, environmental policies debated in governments worldwide, industry and considerable funds designated toward creating and marketing “environmentally-friendly” automobiles, light bulbs, detergent. Yet, sometimes we still can’t see the sky in Los Angeles, in Luoyang, sometimes even on murky summer days in Portland. And why do we need to?

I don’t know why others hike or camp, take walks, sit outside on their lunch hour–I can only speak for myself. My son, daughter, and I often take our dog out around dusk. We are held by the light as it changes, and the darkening occurs softly, and without our noticing. And it is often at this time of day that color blooms across the arc of earth, and cobalt will singe with rose before giving in to black. It is a contest to see who can find the first star of the night, and when one of us calls out and points up, we stop walking and make a wish. It is the only time it occurs to me–in my solidly adult life of bill-paying, meal-fixing, laundry-cleaning–to stop and stand exactly where I am, to pause a thought, to wish. And it is because the sky asks.

One evening when my daughter was younger, she wondered what made the sky spill with paint, how the color arrived, and why it changed and disappeared. I use words like “electromagnetic spectrum,” and “atmosphere,” “dust particles,” “gas molecules,” “water droplets….” Violet is the shortest wavelength, red the longest. Colors are continuously radiated and absorbed, deflected, reflected. Seen. Blue scatters across the sky, at the horizon it is a lighter shade because it is farther away. At dusk because there is less light to carry the shorter-wavelength colors like blues and greens to our eyes, the longer-wavelength colors can sustain, reach further like the fingers of an outstretched hand. So we look up and wait, down on earth, for the colors of a particular day to reveal themselves.

British physicist Philip Gibbs wrote, “It may not be a coincidence that our vision is adjusted to see the sky as a pure hue. We have evolved to fit in with our environment; and the ability to separate natural colours most clearly is probably a survival advantage.” The Physics and Relativity FAQ, 1997. Web. 23 October 2010.

Yesterday my son lay stock still in the bore of an MRI machine. A mirror was positioned in the tunnel so that he could see me sitting at the foot of the flatbed. We both had to be stock-still for an hour. My view consisted of his still-chubby toes (he’d removed his socks prior, trying to eliminate everything that could possibly cause an itch) and above the machine, high on the wall near the ceiling, was a small window, about one and half feet by two. Much more difficult than his previous MRI two years ago, partly because he had a headache going into it, this time midway through they needed to inject him with contrasting fluid. He has historically thin-walled veins that collapse easily, so finding a line in was tricky, took attempts on both arms by two different people, bruised him up, and just plain hurt. He never made a noise, but while they were sticking him with needles he just lay there and the tears quietly rolled down.

I wiped them and squeezed his hand, and after they pushed him back in the bore to complete the rest of the scans, and I sat back at my post in front of his toes, I looked up at that window for the remaining 30 minutes, at the square of sky that wasn’t going anywhere, either. The blue was dense and static, the visual timbre of a resonant note, an oboe perhaps. Several tree branches extended into the frame, the remaining leaves the color of sparks. Clouds interrupted and hung. A breeze pushed around the branches, and while time and our bodies were frozen inside that room, hinged on necessary stillness, the movement outside continued on, the branches conducting the sky. I could watch all this through the small rectangle of glass, and the blue it contained, the bit of tree, the clouds, focus my thoughts away from my son’s tears, away from the new prick marks on the inside of his arm, removed from the clanging, banging sounds of the machine to what was waiting on the other side of the window. I had someplace else to look.

Much of the world is shrouded in the tediousness of smog. And in those places, eyes travel upwards and vision with the capacity to continue on and on, to absorb every shade and hue, is blocked. The call and response betwen physics and geography is unwitnessable.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported air pollution and visibility impact on the skies over our country’s national parks. In eastern parks, average visual range has decreased from 90 miles to 15-25 miles. In the West, visual range has decreased from 140 miles to 35-90 miles.

But, due to continued air pollution, we see less and less of the ground on which we stand, of the sky that dangles the earth. And in turn, there is less context, less information for orienting our complicated, human selves. Those of us here in the West have it better than most, the typical visual range is about 60 – 90 miles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But that’s only half of what it would be without haze. In most of the rest of the U.S., the typical visual range is only 15 – 30 miles, about one-third of the visual range under natural conditions.

A University of Maryland team of researchers recently compiled data of sky visibility measurements taken from 1973 – 2007 at 3,250 meteorological stations around the world. Increased airborne pollution in the atmosphere blocks solar radiation from the earth’s surface, and has caused significant “global dimming.” Science Daily, 2009. Web. 24 October 2010.

And in this continual drought of light we keep trying to verify where we are, even if it means squinting here and there, or re-creating sky in whatever ways we’re able. One of my favorite photographs of my children was taken years ago on a rainy Portland winter day. They’re toddlers, over-sized sheets of paper are clipped to each of their little easels, empty yogurt cups filled with paint are lined up on the table. They each hold brushes, and are standing in their underwear with huge grins pasted across their faces. The paper remains white. Their bodies, however, are covered with every color of dawn, day, and dusk. They’ve painted each other’s backs, too. I remember Sophie saying, “Look, Mama! We’re painting the sky on our tummies!”

The sky is not maneuverable by statistics; and data of diminishing brightness and color informs of tangible implications of visibility impact, but it cannot explore or implicate the emotional tethers created when one’s head is thrown back and for a second or two, we just look. In those moments, a day is contained with clouds, or color, with one thing, perhaps the only thing, that remains steadily and constantly there.