Published Jul 18, 2006
I’m back in Bangkok, picking up a few last gifts before I get on a plane home tomorrow (if you’re reading this entry, it’s probably too late to put in a request for a tchotchke or a small Thai slave). But it’s not the tourist goods that I’m thinking about now, it’s the evil-looking gray cloud that grabbed my attention as I flew to Bangkok from Chiang Mai.
Now, I’ve seen a fair number of clouds in my time. I probably flew on my first plane when I was 6 months old, and I actually remember flights as far back as when I was six or seven. I can easily recall the fascination I felt flying through clouds — watching the wispy fabric slowly envelop the plane,seeing the outside world fade away and then the tendrils touch our wing and surround us. I always loved every moment, I would stare at the slight variations in textures for minutes as we flew through, regret it when we broke into sunlight, and smile and laugh when the plane bumped in the turbulence. I loved clouds, so long as they weren’t tall and gray and stormy, portending darkness and more than our fair share of rough flying.
But these clouds were different — they were thin and diaphanous and, worst of all, a dark grey, stretching out as far as I could see, six miles up. At first I tried to come up with reasons that such a flat cloud would be so dark, and I made up stories about reflected light, about the angle of the sun and how it might be lighting the cloud through its long axis, and about odd-sized dust particles, but nothing could explain such clouds — at least not at over 30,000 feet. I was so busy figuring out what the cloud was, I forgot to take a picture.
Then I realized: it was the Asian haze. Here, at cruising altitude, I was seeing air pollution. So tonight I’m breathing that bad air for you, my readers, so that I can buy you a few last gifts. Or, if you prefer to think like my cab driver does, I’m breathing them so that I can catch a last ping-pong show in Patpong. Either way, I think I’d better add up my pollution credits and make sure that I’ve adequately offset the pollution from my travels this summer, because I don’t want to be adding to that smog more than I have to.
(Oh, and the headline: clouds up so high block out some of the sunlight but refract the rest, creating a general grey-white light source from above, rather than one point source, surrounded by blue. So, the sky appears white. Of course, there are other reasons all of my skies are white, but that’s another entry.)
good thing your friends all got our thai slave requests in early!
damn! i forgot to pack my thai slave in the uhaul