The Color of Summer

In the dim cell where I work, a newspaper clipping hangs on the wall. The date is July 1943, and the headline reads: “Butadiene Smoke Blankets City in Haze.”

As far as I can determine, that story records the first smog attack in Los Angeles’ history. The word “smog” had yet to be invented, of course, and the city, as apparent from the headline, was clueless about the source of its affliction.

Butadiene had been fingered as the villain because it poured from a factory on 7th Street in great, foul quantities. The war effort was going full throttle and butadiene was used in synthetic rubber.

Ironically, the butadiene diagnosis worked to allay people’s fears. It implied a limited problem. All you had to do was shut down the factory and the problem would disappear.

Then the war ended, the factory shut down, but the pall did not go away. It only got worse. Pretty soon the word “smog” began to appear in the newspapers.

We have now lived with smog for more than 50 years. Recently, pollution levels have gone down, but each summer the smog returns and changes the city in fundamental ways. Parts of the landscape disappear and the city seems to shrink physically. The color of the air is altered, and objects of every kind grow more diffuse in the scattered light.

This process has given us a special relationship with smog. We watch it from our patios, study it on the freeways. Smog has become part of our city, and part of us.

I have a friend who claims the city grows more quiet in the summer because of the smog. It’s her own epiphany. The billions and billions of tiny particles absorb sound, she says, producing the same muffled effect you get with a fog or snow.

She tells the story of standing on a rise near Riverside several years ago. The time was early afternoon. She looked up and saw the infamous wall of smog rolling eastward from Los Angeles. The smog seemed pure white, she says, and when it enveloped the rise where she stood the sounds of the cars and people around her grew softer.

The feeling was pleasant. She knows that smog hurts people--she has seen the pictures of blackened lungs taken from the cadavers of longtime L.A. residents--but now she realizes she also takes comfort from it.

Ronald Henry, an environmental scientist at USC, studies the interplay of smog and light. “Smog has insinuated itself in our lives for so long that we don’t even think how it changes our perceptions. But it does,” he says.

Henry tells his own story of taking his teenage daughter, who grew up in Los Angeles, to see the stars on Mt. Pinos near Gorman. Henry reasoned that his daughter had never experienced a truly dark, clear night and would enjoy seeing the thousands of stars shining in the sky.

Instead, he said, she grew apprehensive. “The world was too dark and too large without the smog,” he says. “This huge sky opened up. To her, it didn’t seem right and she got afraid.”

For most of us, the relationship with smog is composed of small observations. Probably the most common is the phenomenon known as light scattering. On summer days, the city gets infused with yellow light that appears to have no direct source. A generation ago the writer Marshall Frady referred to this effect as “the unbright Southern California sunshine.”

That light is a gift of the smog. Tiny particulates spewed from diesel trucks, power plants and the like have so scattered sunshine that the air itself seems illuminated. This light casts only the vaguest of shadows and has a palpable quality. In the afternoons, whole neighborhoods can appear to float in it.

Henry Hogo, a scientist at the AQMD, says light scattering also creates the intense sunsets of summer. Some particles may scatter red light while others scatter blue. “That’s how we get sunsets that you don’t see anywhere else,” he says.

And certain mysteries about smog prevail. Let’s say you’re driving to work and the morning sun is low in the sky. From that point of view, smog will have the color of soap film. But the same smog seen from the surrounding mountains will look either dark gray or yellow-brown.

I put this apparent contradiction to Henry at USC. “We know a huge amount about the physics of smog and light,” he said. “What we don’t know is how the human eye deals with the physics. Many questions have never been answered.”

Actually, Henry says, the smog is the same color at all times: a grayish white. If you point a spectrometer at the smog from the mountains, the spectrometer will report that the smog is, indeed, white.

The eye registers it as yellow-brown because of a physiological trick, he says, known as “induced color.”

“The phenomenon is well known. If you take something that’s gray or white and put it up against a colored background, the eye will induce the complementary color in the gray or white material.

“When you view smog from the mountains, you’re seeing it against the background of a blue sky. And the complement of blue is yellow.”

In a sense, Henry seems to be confirming some old myths about L.A. We live in a city where you can’t even trust the color of smog. It’s fake.

As I was talking to people about this story, one person suggested that our connection to smog was so deep that we might regret its passing from the scene. I doubt that. In fact, our connection with smog already seems to have faded as the intensity of air pollution has begun to wane.

In the 1960s, author Reyner Banham pointed out in his book, “Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies,” that the city had a nearly swaggering attitude toward life in the smog. People seemed proud that they had breathed the air here and survived.

“Their conversations are peppered with phrases like ‘being stuck in a jam in the October heat with the kids in the back puking with the smog,’ ” he wrote.

These tales were like war stories, bigger than life, that grew more elaborate with each retelling.

These days, the relationship has changed to something milder and more tenuous. I don’t think we feel perversely proud of it anymore.

When I made that point to Margaret Brunnell, she seemed happy to hear it. In the 1950s Brunnell served as the assistant to Arie Haagen-Smit, the Caltech chemist who discovered photochemical smog.

It used to be, Brunnell says, that people’s eyes would water so badly from the smog they couldn’t drive. Housewives couldn’t put laundry on a line to dry because their clothes would soon be covered in soot.

After years of fighting for clean air, she says, she realized a corner had been turned when she addressed a school class. She was describing a test once used to measure eye-watering and a kid in the class raised his hand.

Why, the kid asked, would you want to measure eye-watering?

“He had never experienced smog bad enough to make his eyes water,” she says. “I knew then that we were getting somewhere.”

None of which stops Brunnell from engaging in her own idiosyncrasies with smog. More sophisticated than the rest of us, Brunnell has discovered that nighttime smog leaves small, bleaching drops of dew on her roses. So she goes out regularly to inspect her roses on summer mornings.

“It’s the acid in the smog,” she says as I am leaving her house. She stops to show me. We look at the roses but no bleached spots show up.

I say goodbye. As I leave she is hunched over, still looking for the telltale spots that only a 40-year veteran of the smog wars would recognize.