Marine Layer

Posted on April 17, 2009 in Pulmonary Vacation Fall 2003 Weather

Days like this give me headaches. The temperature is up — into the eighties after being in the sixties for many weeks. The clouds have fled east. A stubborn, faint fog squats over the valley and the foothills, an abomination that the weather pundits call a [[marine layer]], a mist off the ocean that doesn’t go away — like [[sciatica]]. I call it [[smog]] and bet that air samples will show it to be bulging with greenhouse gases. Where are the winds that blow this stuff out to sea?

When Spanish sailors anchored off the beaches, they saw the smoke from hundreds of [[Tongva]] and [[Juaneno|Acagchemem]] campfires curling up and then stopping. The smoke just hung there, spreading beneath the [[Inversion_(meteorology)|inversion layer]]. No blue skies for [[Juan_Rodriguez_Cabrillo|Cabrillo]] or for [[Gaspar_de_Portol%C3%A0|Portola]] who followed him by land more than two centuries later. No blue skies for us today.

Workers in medical offices and cubicles ask a unilinear question: “is it warmer out as they promised it would be?”

Yes, I said to my endocrinologist’s assistant. “But it’s full of crud.”

“I don’t like warmer days,” I continued.

“You don’t?” she responded.

“No. They smash my brain.”

Being prepped for my bizarre utterances by the notation of bipolar in my chart, she took my blood pressure, checked my pulse, and asked me if I had taken my heart meds. The doctor went over my numbers with me, noting some were up, but others that had worried her the last time we met were now in range. My “good cholesterol” had fallen a bit.

“How do I raise that?” I asked.

“Exercise,” she said.

Exercise. Summer has charged in. Every day will have a blanket woven of the exhaust of millions of cars and trucks, small factories, and power plants. This will suffocate me as I harness up my little dog and do laps around the park. The long walks of winter are mostly over. I plot midnight strolls around the long circuit that takes me down one long hill and up another. How boring this could become unless an adventure presented it. I wonder: Does the marine layer sink into the ground at night, granting my lungs a respite? I’m going to have to chance the coughing that comes with the arrival of this diaphanous air mass. That “good cholesterol” is too low.