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Show 'Wheeze' doesn't like rust-colored air I ran into "Wheeze" Harper just the other day, when he came stumbling down the street with that desperate look we've all come to recognize as Wheeze's normal state. Life hasn't been easy for Wheeze, who dedicated his life to finding fresh air, and then had the misfortune to settle in Utah Valley. Wheeze is one of those Califor-nians Califor-nians who came to Utah looking for purity of many kinds. He grew up in the murk of Los Angeles, where folks pretty much felt you had to see the air if you had any intention of trying to breathe it. And breathe, Wheeze did, sucking in particulates at a rate that would have left a lesser-lunged man, well, breathless. But as he grew up, he watched a lot of television shows that led him to believe that there were some places on the earth where you couldn't see the air, where there was nothing visible between you and the clear, blue sky, where the sun didn't have that red haze around it all day long. So when Wheeze was old enough he took off on a quest for a blue sky. But Wheeze hated being alone. And he craved the creature comforts of big city civilization. Growing up in urban California can do that to you. He was in Oregon looking for a breath of fresh air when Mount St. Helens blew. Then he haunted the East Coast, breathing the murk he had come to know as air, and wondering if it ever got any better. the editor's column By MARC HADDOCK He spent some time in the mountains, until he heard President Reagan explain that pine trees are some of the greatest air polluters on earth. Through the south and midwest Wheeze hunted for the perfect spot, and when he came to Utah Valley, about a year-and-a-half ago, he thought he'd finally found it. He bought a home in west Orem, a few blocks from Geneva Road, but high enough to enable him to look over the top of the plant and see Utah Lake. "This valley was beautiful," he told me in tones of bittersweet nostalgia. "We could look across the lake and actually see the shore line on the the other side. Oh, those mountains to the west weren't real pretty, but the air was so clean." Then Geneva started up again, and Wheeze, who has no feel for the value of honest labor the plant provides, feels bitter and cheated. "When we first came here it was just right," Wheeze explains, a steady whistle coming from deep in his chest. "You couldn't see the air, but it smelled like air is supposed to smell, you know what I mean? 'Sure I know. That's because there are too many cars in this little valley, and the air fills up with gunk whether you can see it or not. "Exactly," Wheeze said. "That's the way air ought to smell. I've been places where the air doesn't smell at all and I almost fainted because my brain refused to believe there was air if you couldn't smell it and taste it. "So Utah Valley was perfect. Just right for a city-dweller turned suburbanite. If you started to run out of particulates, a little jog down Provo's University Avenue was all it took to bring the carbon monoxide level up in the old lungs." Well, I responded, that's still the case, isn't it? "Yes, but now you can see it. I don't mind breathing it, but I've been looking at it all my life. I'm going to close that plant down if it's . the last thing I do," Wheeze sneezed. With a sense of loss and regret, I passed him my hanky. But Wheeze, I explained, that the price of prosperity. "Who needs prosperity?" he coughed. "When we moved here, no one was prospering, and we bought our house for a song. Now you can hardly see it, and I'd like to try to sell it for what we paid for it. "We're paying for the plant with our quality of life, and the cost is more than we ought to bear." Just to be able to see across the lake? Isn't prosperity worth that? "Not when I have to brush the rusty dust off my car when I go to work in the morning," he responded. But that was a one-time accident, and they said the dust didn't react with anything, so it wasn't dangerous. "Not dangerous," he admitted, "but too darn visible for me. I don't mind looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, but I'll be darned if I'll look at it through rust-colored rust-colored air." There wasn't much more to be said. After all, I've talked to enough of these Californians who want to mold the world to suit their tastes to know you don't make much of an impression on them, so I wished Wheeze well with his campaign for clean, or at least invisible, air, and went on my way. And by the way, Wheeze, you can keep the hanky. |