EPA: 'Coal Rolling' Is Illegal so get your trucks fixed

[Hekate]

41. It's made a real difference from when I was a kid, I can tell you

I spent part of my childhood in San Fernando Valley, then moved to Hawai'i. Came back with my parents in 1965 and lived near Ontario in San Bernardino County.

When we first got there our new neighbors kept referring to Mount Baldy as a nearby mountain, very nice place to drive up and picnic in the summer, ski in the winter. I assumed I couldn't actually see it because it must be much farther away in Hawai'ian terms. Then one day I was wearing polarized sunglasses, looked up and saw this absolutely gigantic thing looming over the landscape. I took off my sunglasses, and it vanished again.

That was about an hour from LA, and there were some days it just hurt to breathe. My college friends and I would drive up Mount Baldy as far as we could, and we'd look down on all those dirty layers of air: dark gray, dark yellow-brown, just layer after layer of crud you could see. Mom said Cucamonga, where we lived, was 5,000 feet in elevation -- I don't know how high Baldy is, but it's huge, it goes much higher up. Everything below was awful.

I left after 3 years swearing never to return. There were a lot of reasons, homesickness for the Islands among them, but the SoCal inland air was certainly a factor.

When I returned in 1979, it was to live by the ocean on the Central Coast. In the mid-1980s I got to know a civil engineer who worked for something with the strange name of AQMD -- Air Quality Management District. Something had really changed in California. It's not perfect, even by the ocean, but it is far, far better than it was.