‘Mom, would you really have
shipped me off to Denver?’ I asked my mother recently.
‘Absolutely,’ she said.
‘But imagine,’ I said, ‘what it
would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution,
surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?’
‘You were very, very sick,’ she explained.’Nothing helped.’ She
told how my doctor had recommended sending me to live at the
Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital in Denver. In the
1960s, when I was so sick, this was the best facility for asthmatic
children in the United States. For many families, it became a last
resort. But, luckily or unluckily for me, it was full up, so I got
to stay home.
This talk with my mother helped me
understand what propelled thousands of sufferers of asthma, hay
fever and consumption, from the 1870s onwards, to abandon family
and home to seek relief in the cool mountain air of the Rockies or
the dry climate of Tucson.
American writer Helen Hunt
Jackson was one such health-seeker. Her decade of seasonal
wanderings in search of relief from hay fever ended in Colorado in
1873. Dispatched a year earlier by the New York Independent to
write a series about life and landscape on the Western frontier,
Jackson found in the Rocky Mountain region ‘the divinest air’ she
ever breathed. So divine that she was soon saying goodbye to her
friend Emily Dickinson and her beloved White Mountains of New
Hampshire to take up residence in Colorado Springs. Once settled,
she urged her new community to weigh carefully the value of its
healthy air against denuded mountainsides and smoke bestowed by the
region’s mining and smelting industries.
Another seeker
of health, decades later, was Joseph Wood Krutch, Columbia
University professor, drama critic and venerable figure in the New
York City literary scene. What compelled Krutch to give it all up
in the 1950s to move to Tucson? Asthma. The sparseness of life, the
vast open space of the West, and the warm, dry air brought Krutch
not only physical renewal, but also a deepening appreciation for
the ecology of the desert and the spiritual meanings he found
there. Krutch championed its beauty in his books, The Desert Year
and The Voice of the Desert. But by the 1960s, Krutch was horrified
by the increasing haze of smoke and dust that was robbing Tucson of
its invigorating air. He was also appalled by the spread of lawns
that consumed the city’s precious water.
Sadly, the
warnings brought by Jackson and Krutch proved warranted. In less
than a century, Denver and Tucson became polluted. By the 1960s,
Denver’s rapid growth and reliance on the automobile resulted in
carbon monoxide and ozone problems as bad as those found in much
larger metropolitan areas like Los Angeles.
Tucson owed
its reputation as a haven for allergy sufferers because of the way
in which its plants reproduce. Creosote, cacti, and other flora of
the desert rely almost exclusively on animals and insects — rather
than the wind — to carry their pollen. This quirk of climate and
biogeography resulted in allergy relief for Tucson’s health
seekers. But newcomers from the East favored the ‘civilized’ look
of the cities they’d left, and so planted Bermuda grass lawns and
adorned their streets with ornamental mulberry and olive trees. In
the 1970s, Tucson’s trees reached maturity, grass pollen and mold
spores increased, and native wind-pollinated weeds species like
tumbleweed and desert ragweed thrived in newly disturbed soils. In
just over 20 years, the atmospheric pollen load of allergenic plant
species in Tucson increased ten-fold; the city’s incidence of
asthma was now twice, and hay fever six-to-nine times, the national
average.
Over the course of a century, the health-giving
hope once found in the Western landscape was washed away by the
flood of people, industries, transportation, and plants that came
with progress. Asthmatics and hay fever sufferers who came West as
a last resort found themselves out of place — or at least out of
breath — in the promised land. But a new road to Shangri-La
appeared, one paved with antihistamines and corticosteroids.
In this happy place, we take a pill or a puff and feel
better, while conveniently ignoring how changes wrought upon the
landscape have led to the rise of allergy and asthma, not only
across Western landscapes, but across the globe.
Gregg Mitman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News. He is a professor of medical history
at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the author of
Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and
Landscapes.
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