Sky


Dust storm from the nearby Gobi Desert rolling in.

I’d expected China to explode in Technicolor like a vibrant, gong-clanging, headdress-wearing dragon dance.

Beijing was gray and brown. Its predominant sound was the drone of traffic.

I worried about the sky. A few days that year it cleared to a pale blue; climbing the gang ladder to the roof of my apartment building I could see the mountain range silhouetted to the north. Every other day, week upon week, a dusty smoggish soup choked the atmosphere, flattening all vision in a bland smear from asphalt to buildings to sky. Exhaust stained the backs of buses, cars; I wondered if a year in Beijing would stain my lungs.

A dozen smokestacks punctured the close city sky. I hardly noticed them until the night I climbed to the roof to clear my head. Inactive during the day, at night the smokestacks turned adamant, spewing thick fumes as if racing against dawn. Whom were they fooling? It seemed like an environmental version of saving face, paying lip service by restricting pollution to the cover of darkness. At nights I laid in bed thinking about the toxic recipe being concocted for my morning air. American cities may not be much better (I’ve seen the dirty brown bubble of New York City from 30,000 feet), but something about the frenzied glee of those midnight smokestacks, right within city limits, made Beijing’s pollution seem unchecked.

What struck me most about the sky, though, was the lightning.

In America lighting is tinted bluish purple and tends to bolt or branch downward. The lightning I saw in Beijing was tinted orange and tended to arc in elaborate webs from cloud to cloud.

I didn’t see many storms that year; perhaps my impression was based on too few to be accurate. But my sincere, slack-jawed sense was that the lightning looked plain different, foreign – and somehow Chinese, as if even electricity were a cultural construct. My mind bewildered mind buzzed, “Just how far away from home am I?”


Gobi dust storm approaching.


Sky 180 degrees opposite the approaching dust storm.


Dust storm.

Read next ->

This entry was posted on January 15, 2008 at 8:25 am and is filed under Arrival, beijing, china, travel. Tagged: , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Sky”

  1. RubeRad Says:
    January 15, 2008 at 11:32 am

    What, no pictures of the lightning?

  2. the forester Says:
    January 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    What, no pictures of the lightning?

    I wish! :-) If only I’d known at the time I would one day write a book about all this. I’d've photographed and saved everything.

  3. RubeRad Says:
    January 16, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    You’d have to have a pretty quick trigger-finger!

  4. the forester Says:
    January 28, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Thanks to Open Air for linking to this article:

    New York Times: Olympic teams vying to defeat Beijing’s smog

    As the lead exercise physiologist for the United States Olympic Committee, Randy Wilber has been fielding one bizarre question after another from American athletes training for the Beijing Games.

    Should I run behind a bus and breathe in the exhaust? Should I train on the highway during rush hour? Is there any way to acclimate myself to pollution?

    Mr. Wilber answers those questions with a steadfast, “No.”

    To protect the athletes, Mr. Wilber is encouraging them to train elsewhere and arrive in Beijing at the last possible moment. He is also testing possible Olympians to see if they qualify for an International Olympic Committee exemption to use an asthma inhaler. And, in what may be a controversial recommendation, Mr. Wilber is urging all the athletes to wear specially designed masks over their noses and mouths from the minute they step foot in Beijing until they begin competing.

    Pollution levels on a typical day in Beijing, some researchers say, are nearly five times above World Health Organization standards for safety.

    Some athletes who competed in Olympic test events last year complained that the foul air made it difficult to breathe and caused upper-respiratory infections and nausea. Colby Pearce, 35, an Olympic hopeful in track cycling from Boulder, Colo., said he saw smog floating inside the velodrome in Beijing. His throat became scratchy and he developed bronchitis, he said, because of air pollution.

    “When you are coughing up black mucus, you have to stop for a second and say: ‘O.K., I get it. This is a really, really bad problem we’re looking at,’ ” he said.

    The United States boxing team, while competing in China last month, ran in the hotel hallways instead of on the streets because the air was “disgusting,” said Joe Smith, the team manager.

    United States triathletes wore masks in China last September, but removed them before competing. They stepped off the bus looking like a group of incredibly fit surgeons or, as one triathlete put it, a gathering of Darth Vaders.

    No other teams were wearing masks. Some opponents snickered.

    “You do look kind of silly wearing it,” said Jarrod Shoemaker, 25, of Sudbury, Mass., who had competed in Beijing twice before. “But I wore it before the race this time, and I didn’t feel burning in my throat afterward. I could still taste the grit on my teeth, but I could actually talk and breathe. That wasn’t the case in other years.”

  5. Karen Chan Says:
    January 28, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    Nice post. Everything I hear about China’s suffering environment makes me sad. I really wonder how people survive there. I would not survive a week.

Leave a Reply