Is No Place Safe? : Californians in England Find Too Much Familiar

Some little bug is gonna find you some day/Some little bug will creep behind you some day. --1940s song popularized by Phil Harris

When we lived in Southern California, we guardedly gave ourselves credit for daily heroisms. After all, everyone else was living under the same shadows of doom.

There was the specter of The Big One, ameliorated only slightly by the number of swinging chandeliers one had witnessed and dull roars heard during Little Ones. We played the seasonal percentages of floods, flash or oceanic, of skin-blistering forest and brush fires, of roof-lifting, tree-hurling Santa Anas. Of consecutive bake-oven days, for that matter. What the heck. Life is a risk.

In the fullness of time, there came also the transformation of pleasant roadways to nightmarish, blood-and-guts free(?)ways and their logical conclusion: gridlock. We learned to look for deadly matter infused into food. The hazards of raw milk and soft cheeses swam into our ken. Photochemical smog filled our lungs and burned our eyes. We hung in there.

When we came to the United Kingdom, we congratulated ourselves. What a temperate climate, what clean air! Hardly any of the police carried guns, ditto the thugs. There were too many cars, but we didn’t need one anyhow. We breathed free.

Today we have translated our philosophical putting-up-with into British: We don’t make a fuss. But we are now heroic at least three times a day, and the opportunities for heroism are gaining on us. We eat and drink and are addicted to breathing.

Here in Cambridge, we are surrounded by the vast grain farms of East Anglia. The elevators are brimful as any in Kansas. The hedgerows and the peat were cleared, the chemical fertilizers heaped on. The nitrates have percolated. A glass of tap water is a mixed drink.

For each microbe and bacillus/Has a different way to kill us/And in time they all will claim us for their own. --Ibid.

Everyone’s medical vocabulary of horrors has expanded of late: salmonella, listeriosis, scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Everyone’s diet has grown correspondingly dramatic.

The great salmonella-in-eggs scare cost the government one junior cabinet minister, potential millions to indemnify egg farmers for their losses after the public was frightened off eggs, and a whole lot of credibility. We are still supposed to boil the hell out of all our eggs.

Which salmonella came first? Buying prepared chicken dishes was next announced to be hazardous to our health. Or maybe not, depending on the authority quoted. All this presumably traceable to “battery farming” and unsavory practices such as feeding chickens to other chickens. More items off the shopping list.

It wasn’t long before we were warned about all cook-and-chill foods. Many of us were especially miffed when the government added that householders probably made things worse: We didn’t understand our fridges.

Then there was the great contaminated soft-cheese flap; sides massed once more around the banners of pasteurization and its antithesis. One Common Market minister is said to have outraged the French by whispering over the Camembert at a meeting, “This can poison you.”

Television zoomed in on cattle staggering, crashing down, flailing. Menacing sound-track voice: “This steer is going insane.”

BSE, bovine relative of sheep scrapie, has sent more than a frisson through beef-happy Britain. Is it or isn’t it confined to beef brains? Where do beef brains get used anyhow? A shudder passed through the dog-food industry, and all of us started reading the small print on food labels. Should we give up pasties?

Revelation upon revelation in this densely populated, California-sized land where news and rumor go instantaneously.

Hearty British grains may contain untraceable toxic chemicals, the residue of pesticides that have cleverly bonded to the grain itself. They were as bad as cold-storage potatoes. Rusks--biscuits for babies--immediately became suspect.

Next, jars of baby food were found laced with glass shards.

Oh, yes, cow’s milk has just been discovered to be loaded with dieldrin.

So much for wheat bread and milk, beef and potatoes.

In the north, where lambs gambol, the Chernobyl levels remain erratic. The coastline where seafood comes from doesn’t meet Continental European standards. Can the sturdy British porker meet all the demands to be made upon it? Run, rabbit (and deer), run.

Inebriate of air am I/And debauchee of dew. --Emily Dickinson

And now to breathing. Legionnaire’s Disease has found a home in Britain. One never knows what will shower down from air-conditioning units high above one. Derring-do in walking the pavements! Bravado in inhaling!

(We Southern Californians can’t understand the new-construction mandate for air conditioning that shuts out the British climate.)

Don’t breathe while driving, either. The number of private vehicles on Britain’s skinny, crumbling roads has passed 21 million, only a handful burning unleaded gasoline.

Back in L.A. we sat in our smog cocktail, awaiting strong winds to whisk it into the wide open spaces. Here, the stuff gets wafted north toward the Pole.

We’ve been told that a hole in the Arctic ozone could open this spring. Such a hole you wouldn’t believe, and here we’re a lot closer to the Pole than we used to be. Should we stay inside till autumn? Should we dress like Bedouins? X-ray technicians?

Ah, ozone. In L.A.’s smog, it’s supposed to be terrible. In the stratosphere, ozone is something else, and it’s terrific. Too bad we can’t turn L.A.’s smog ozone to good and paste it onto the Polar Zones.

Let the poisons and the bugs fight it out among themselves. We’ve run out of places to hide.