Wildfires have blanketed the Southland in an ashy haze. Above, a darkened sky outside Christ Cathedral last week in Garden Grove. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) When I close my eyes and think about that day in the late 1970s, I’m struck by the colors. The bright red of my favorite shirt. The silvery gray of smog sifting through the trees. The leaves, bleached by chemicals in the air, were soft-edged blobs of an indiscriminate dark hue. I was in college and I’d driven from Northridge to Pasadena to visit the Norton Simon Museum. I don’t remember the paintings. What I do remember is the air pollution, thick and viscous. It is hard not to think about smog during this terrible mid-September. California is on fire, millions of acres torched, tens of thousands of people evacuated. The pall of smoke from Northern California’s flames has been visible from space. The sky is an orangey tan in the San Gabriel Valley, cement gray-brown even at the beach. Mountains have vanished behind the haze. It’s like a memo from Southern California’s past, a dire reminder of the bad old days when smoke-belching cars rolled through the streets, unchastened, when […]
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