It's difficult to think on— Looking at my dog so emaciated, unable to keep anything down. The bulbous tumor open and bleeding everywhere in a way that never seems to close. In the background, the whisper of the freeway murmuring away. Working-class people shuffle around audibly. The car doors and the running engines, even as I write this my downstairs neighbor kid comes to ask me for $2 in quarters in exchange for two velvety, worn dollar bills.
The smell of natural gas could be noticed from the freeway today and on my way home, making me think it was coming from some leaking tanker car. Eventually even that was drowned out in the pungent asphalt, and the other urgencies of the day.
They say that this area code has the worst air quality in the country. That, people that live here will on average live 5-10 years less by inhabiting this place. And it's hard to visualize— the thing that we can’t see killing us slowly in the trainyard that is Globeville, and the wrecking yard/chop shops of Elyria, and the coal refineries of Swansea. Just enclaves where people inhabit like crustaceous organisms gripping the submerged legs of an offshore derrick. Multiplying and spawning the next generation of human accessories to these environment-destroying mechanisms. Barnacles to utterly indifferent mechanical god.
And I think it exposes something unique; when they put that big air-quality monitor over at Lorraine Granado they gave themselves an answer that they could never act upon. As if we’re the air quality Flint Michigan. And, as if I’m spinning a non-fiction yarn, there is fuck-all that anyone is about to do about it. Its toxicity is measurable and somehow *nobody* is at fault. (Its definitely not that Diesel shop on 44th and Broadway, the one that constantly blocks the road along with the insulation warehouse across the street daily. They care deeply for the laws and the lasting impact their actions have on the community.) It’s not the myriad of literal, illegal, completely unregulated, chop-shops, or the stock show and all the biological filth that brings into the city at regular intervals, nor is it the various particulate generating factories that can be smelled and felt in the eyes for miles. But that’s the point, the city has ceded so much of itself to these industries pointing out that the air is bad here is, adorably Denver. As if there is any recourse. Like, one would think that the poisonous air would lower the cost of housing, or that the inflated cost of housing could make moves that might help anyone other than the vanity of real estate investors. Yesterday, as we spread seeds over the Northside of Argo, a train passed by, its engines shot literal fire out the top as they passed, I could feel the heat as the engines struggled to shove the cars westward. So much thick white smoke sprayed out that it filled the entire valley behind Argo. It took double-digit minutes to waft away as a thick fog of diesel fumes blanketed the house there.
It fills me with such a complex emotion— in some ways, as if we are just meant to be sacrificed to some mechanical ideal. Consumed by the machine, and our art and creativity and humanity are these invisible, meaningless aberrations to the capitalist vision. (As they hire Cuttyup to paint more of the same exact face on every fucking surface because it’s appropriate ‘public art’ like spackling weak graffiti as a placation) And it makes me wonder whose vision it was, to turn this place into this; a place where imagination is brought so low, not by discouragement but by contamination of security, not from deliberate action but through negligence so profound they transformed it into something dangerous to live in. Will history look back upon this and think about our plight? Will it think about our cancers and melanoma, our lymphomas and emphysema, with the same callous indifference that it did when inflation and debt consumed the dreams of a whole generation.
Based on what I have seen and experienced; I imagine so.
And I hear it in her heavy, labored breathing. Trying to overcome what is inherently insurmountable. As we experience the undertow of this way of life taking its course; I’m stuck with the reality— I’ll be here (for better or worse) enduring this, for longer. This entire situation has headed me off at every level. When a path out seems possible it is just as quickly shut down. Every play is this dead end, like a big maze that when looked upon from a distance has no exit. As if we just become involved and disappear within. Forgotten. As all of it isn’t interrelated and terminal: the tumor that is taking the life of my family member is the same cloud of poisons that linger over this place, is the same cough that my neighbor has, it’s the same shitshow that keeps these cretins on drugs stealing metal to recycle, it’s the same second-hand nature of the whole experience. And I guess Julie said it best the other day: (with her usual, situational wisdom) “It's a big beast.”
And to that, its such a big shitty beast; when it comes into your house and kills your fucking dog. When the police corner an active shooter, and the dull exchange of gunfire hours later denotes some kind of closure through violence. Closure here always feels like violence, aggressive or otherwise, it lingers in the air, like so many microscopic particles that unravel our lives. Certainly beyond the parameters of a lifetime, (in a cartoonishly villan-esque twist) one made all the shorter by inhabiting these spaces.
And it heads me off at every interval. Liquidambar and Gingko are respectively the trees with the greatest pollution sequestration and the greatest pollution tolerance that I know of. They can both grow here, they are both found in North America. And this would do almost nothing. Its about 50 trees to a car annually, maybe like 30 Liquidambar. And were importing entire trains of coal through the northside every morning. Currently, we have one Gingko at Argo.
I don’t see how this problem can be solved, and its literally killing us. (Slowly, but surely.) And in tandem of all these mixed feelings, it brings up an interesting question: Is this the best use of my time? It's like the north of Denver is so unimportant that its people’s lives don’t matter. And I don’t know how to address that. But horticulture is my ikigai, and I refuse to go down without at least voicing my opinion:
turn these dumpy little areas into air-quality sinks. In the case of Lorraine Granado they're just driving all over it anyway. Overplant liquidambar all over that field. Make it so dense you’d get a car stuck in there. Leave the cars in there if they get stuck. We could wall it off with the abandoned cars that we acquire from our other parks. Just seasons of Liquidambar leaves burying abandoned cars; as if using the trash as a gridlock to protect the trees, the most unwalkable forest ever created. Dumping airborne carbon back all over itself forever. And the vehicles become a strange partly submerged in-ground trash oddity, better than at Heron Pond; you wouldn’t even have to mow it. Astutely, making the case that we *could be* reducing our carbon footprint two-fold.
(...You can only imagine how I would design the forest at Swansea. How I would create the hillside pavilion at inspiration point. Overhaul the turf at heron pond without quarter.)
Meanwhile, the value of the property continues to climb indefinitely from runaway inflation. People of my demographic will never be homeowners to the point where the misuse of land (as with golf courses) becomes a mockery of us through class disparity. As we watch the rich play a sport in lieu of us having a family. As if were supposed to offer a meek smile and accept it as normal over an overpriced beer, in an overpriced neighborhood, with dramatically inflated rent, as inflation debases everything we work for. While an inept and comatose and (above all else) corrupt government work at the beck and call of other people that have the privilege to play golf. To play alternative-reality sport for an afternoon knowing that the field alone consumes more water, resources, and staff than an entire district of the city. Leering at us through wistful ignorance. Like having a bullet-hole in your truck and people debating whether you should get hazard pay.
Even when it’s not about the money; it’s about the money.
And the truth is: It consumes me; is this the best use of my time? Is this what I should be doing? It would literally be safer and easier to just go somewhere else. Lest I grow an inoperable tumor on my neck, or a melanoma that becomes terminal. But that’s what the Northside is: terminal. It will be this way until the city dies, even if it is the cause of that death. Like an insurmountable aberration, that captures our thoughts and brings the reality of the situation full circle: it will head us off at every venture. It will fight us for every action, even if those actions intend to heal, we are made of forms, fragile to type of treachery here. As we are met with indifference to the circumstance of our reality.
