With Regrets to Yeats, Cecil B. DeMille, and to a Lesser Degree, Charlton Heston

I live at the southern tail end of the Wasatch Front. Have planted myself here all my life. Was born here, actually, so it’s more fitting that I have grown here. From pretty deep roots. It is a pleasant place. Rural. Mostly. Good quality of life kind of place with Mormons waiting on the Millennium. I can’t say I really paid all that much attention to the air quality here all of my life. At the tail end of the Wasatch Front. Here at the end where it usually takes a little longer for the air quality to drift south and present itself clearly.

By that I mean hazy.

By that I mean I’ve been telecommuting my job for about four years now, and before that I used to drive north into the thick of it every day, spring summer fall. Winter.

There is that idea that a frog content in a pot of water with the heat on under it doesn’t know it’s going to get boiled. Commuting, at least for me, allowed me to consciously dip in and out of that pot mostly. But now, I sit here in my den that faces south, faces away from the central heat under the pot of the Salt Lake Valley and of its southern sister. Utah Valley. I sit here. In the place I was raised. In the place I live and raised five children who live in and on the edges of the pot. I sit here.

Cecil B. DeMille. Wikipedia attributes a quote to him. “It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.” Commandments?

The law of the Wasatch Front is dirty air all winter long.

Google search: law definition, 2. “a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present.”