Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Nudging toys and rabbit-shaped balloons out of the way, we ducked in front of a row of
vendors. There was writing on the ground. Half a dozen men were practicing calligraphy,
using long brushes to paint water on the stones of the plaza.
That was the last straw. The civic charm offensive was complete. To grow old within
walking distance of Drum Tower Square seemed like a blessing, if you had the lungs for
it. Here, in the smog capital of the universe, I was reminded that there was more than one
kind of health.
Sometimes I despair at the prospect of growing old in my own country. In the United
States, seniors are supposed to keep to the house, or at least stick to the park benches. You
don't exactly see them playing Frisbee in Central Park. In Linfen, though, citizens old and
young come to exercise in the public square, and sing old songs, and play hacky sack. They
dance, they slide electrically, they watch their kids or grandkids ride plastic tricycles around
like lunatics. They write poems in water on the flagstones, and watch them evaporate. This
place was pretty great.
Don't worry. I'm not debunking anything. We're still ruining the world, and Linfen is
still polluted as hell. The reason I find myself beating the same thematic horse on every
continent isn't that the polluted places of the world aren't polluted. It's that I love them. I
love the ruined places for all the ways they aren't ruined. Does somebody live there? Does
somebody work there? Does somebody miss it when they leave? Those places are still just
places. But when we read horror stories about them at home in our cozy green armchairs,
we turn them into something else, into stages on which our worst fears can play out.
We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell
ourselves that the problems are
over there.
And we'd like to keep it that way. We'd like to
keep a tidy bubble for ourselves, and draw a line around some trees, and declare
no farther.
That
here,
at least, inside
this
boundary, nature survives. As long as there is Yellowstone,
we'll have a little something for what ails us. What a joke. So much of our environmental
consciousness is just aesthetics, a simple idea of what counts as beautiful. But that love of
beauty has a cost. It becomes a force for disengagement. Linfen is too foul to care about.
Port Arthur is too gross.
So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones, too. But I hate the idea that
there's any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it
isn't, then I'm not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.
One calligrapher finished painting a broad grid of beautifully rendered characters, and
several of his fellows began a jocular critique of his work. An aging man with a dark green
jacket and a bad comb-over saw us watching, and stepped forward.
