The muck dredged up a long-forgotten memory.
I grew up in Southern California in the 1960s. It was paradise. Beach Boy tunes wafted over pristine beaches inhabited by surfers in baggies (our swimsuits - knee-length and decades ahead of their time) and bronzed bikinied babes. Orange groves descended like green battalions from the foothills to the coast.
But every paradise has its serpent. Ours came in the form of an ominous brown cloud that occasionally slithered down from Los Angeles.
I remember being let out for recess, intrigued by the orangey phenomenon that made it impossible to see the far side of the playground. The air was brownish yellow. It smelled. It left a metallic taste on the tongue.
To a 12-year-old, this was cool.
Herds of squealing exuberance spilled out and played hide and seek until, one by one, we went from running, to walking, to gasping. Like shades emerging from Hades, we staggered back to classrooms and nursed a deep, burning pain in our chests until sixth period.
The orange cloud that burned our developing lungs had a name: smog. It mostly came from the tailpipes of cars.
A friend who grew up in Long Beach remembers coming in from playing outside, her little lungs desperately trying to suck enough oxygen to continue living. Her mother chided her for being too sensitive - Mom proudly announced that her lungs had long since been toughened by years of dedicated smoking.
Back in the day, we Americans assumed the smell of smog in the morning meant progress. There was no pollution control. The gas we put in our cars was impregnated with lead. Lead, that wonder element which was effective at reducing engine knock in cars and IQ in people. The oil companies called it ethyl.
Despite an occasional yellow haze, Salt Lake City was mostly spared the really horrific clouds of toxic '60s exhaust. But only because it was small. Metropolitan Salt Lake extended south to 4500 where a sign warned: Beyond this place there be dragons. OK, maybe not dragons, but cows. Murray, Sandy, Draper, Herriman were cow pastures.
It was only later that I put together the beefing up of the Clean Air Act with the disappearance of the lead-saturated cloud from the City of Angels. Exhaust from cars was reduced twentyfold overnight. Following 1970, I could safely pursue my career as a mediocre, but unleaded, high school cross-country runner.
But I remember the tantrum carmakers threw at having to include pollution-control devices. The cost of catalytic converters is prohibitive, they said. It's technologically impossible, they said. It will kill American competitiveness, they said. We'll be forced to lay off workers, they said.
The oil companies whined just as loudly about getting the lead out.
Government benchmarks were met and the American economy didn't end up propped on cinder blocks. Better yet, we could all breathe easier.
What has this got to do with Utah and car pollution and the haze of wildfires? Nothing, really, except that we forget. We forget that government regulation can sometimes be a good thing. We forget that bureaucrats in Washington have prevented developers from building million-dollar condos in Bryce Canyon for rich clients and turning national parks into gated communities for CEOs. We forget that we trust our bridges not to collapse because certain government agencies are well-funded and staffed.
This is an alternate history article, a cautionary science fiction tale.
Imagine the Salt Lake Valley, with its million cars and two million people, without the Clean Air Act. It's not just the mountains that would be lost in the haze - your neighbors across the street would disappear in a soupy cloud the color of rust. The Salt Lake Basin would be an especially toxic bowl of poison in which you and your children would marinate in lead.
For now, that's just fiction.
---
* PAT BAGLEY is the editorial cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune. He is the co-author with his brother, Will Bagley, of This Is the Place: A Crossroads of Utah's Past.
