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chapter ten Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 80 Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear. For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, We questioned him again, and yet again; But every word that from the peasant’s lips Came in reply, translated by our feelings, Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps. wordsworth, The Prelude, VI, 586 On march 28, 1996, I packed up the car in preparation for a fivethousand mile automobile trip to the Southwest and California that would take me away from home for at least three weeks. The plan was to visit Tucson, Los Angeles, Davis, and Reno to see a number of friends and family members as well as to explore a few potential warm spots to which I might move in order to escape once and for all the harshness of Chicagoland ’s winters. The drive would doubtless be bittersweet, a lonely solo unavoidably retraversing many places that my now dead wife, Gloria, and I had visited together—in our unflagging happiness—sometime around 1985. The final stop would be Reno, where a little book-signing party was to be sponsored by the University of Nevada’s English department to celebrate the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader, the fruit of half a dozen years of rewarding editorial collaboration with Cheryll Glotfelty. I packed up my still quite new, rather spiffy, Saturn SL-2 with more than enough provisions and equipment for meals in motel rooms, including a hot plate, cans of wholesome soups and chilis, coffee, oatmeal, lowfat cookies (and other necessities of a health nut’s diet), utensils, gifts, clothes for various climates, and twenty-four compact disks loaded into two twelve-disk magazines that could be inserted into the compact disk changer that I considered an essential option in the car’s purchase. Some long and lonely days inevitably lay ahead. 104 The next morning I took off for Springfield, Missouri; then Amarillo, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and on the fourth day—after passing a moonscapish formation of rocks and boulders in southeastern Arizona— I eyed with slight nervousness the faint nimbus of orange sky that greeted my arrival at Tucson. My obsession with ecology had begun in the early seventies when Gloria and I (deceived by the benign direction of summer winds during house hunting) were ignorant enough to have bought a little farm in northwest Indiana, captivatingly beautiful but also the most polluted place I have ever dwelled in my life. In our dispiriting and futile effort to contend with the physical and mental symptoms caused by apocalyptic quantities of effluents from the steel mills of Gary, we quickly turned into hypersensitized canaries, acquiring a new awareness of even the most miniscule amounts of insalubrious air. Now, all my travels resembled the food tours of decadent gourmets, although in my case the ingestions derived not from eager tastings of the sophisticated concoctions of four-star restaurants but from involuntary inbreathings of complex toxic bouquets, the particular particulates and waste products of distinctive industrial outputs in cities and countrysides all over North America and Europe. Tucson’s air turned out to be still relatively salutary, although a far cry from its celebrated purity of yesteryear. But it was better than Chicago’s and infinitely better than anything breathable around Los Angeles, so I felt Tucson offered a real possibility for relocation. After a few rewarding days exploring landscape and housing, I headed northwest on the I-10 to Phoenix, which proved a very different kettle of fish. Halfway there, though nothing obvious was to be seen around me, I began to experience a tightening up of the sinuses and throat—what people call “flu-like” symptoms—as well as the familiar signs of a pollution headache. (But in my years of experience the most toxic air pollution has tended to be partially or totally invisible.) Once into Phoenix, however, I began to feel well again under sunny blue skies. I now could see that the northeast wind was blowing a vast dark orange plume of smog to the south and west of the city, a plume whose outer edges I had probably briefly traversed en route from Tucson. This plume, broadening rapidly into a wider and wider triangle as it expanded from its source, accompanied me all the way to Blythe at the California border, a distance of roughly 175 miles. As it gradually dissipated into the California...

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